LogicThing

Description

Digital logic is the most beautiful idea in computing, and the hardest to see. LogicThing makes it visible. Drop a gate on an infinite grid, wire it up, and watch the signal move: green for HIGH, blue for LOW, live, the instant you flip a switch. Start with one LED. End with a processor you built yourself. LogicThing is a native macOS app written in Swift and SwiftUI. No Java. No Electron. No account. REAL SIMULATION, NOT ANIMATION - Two engines. Instant mode settles every change immediately. Timing mode models real propagation delay, so you can watch a race condition happen and learn why hardware needs setup time. - Single-step any clock. Right-click a clock, choose Step This Clock, and press . to advance exactly one edge. Walk a state machine one transition at a time. - The Timeline is a built-in logic analyzer. Watch any net as a waveform, pick hex, decimal, or binary per lane, then scrub, pan, and pinch-zoom through the history. - Faults are honest. Two outputs fighting over one net turn red and force the net to Unknown, because a simulator that guesses teaches the wrong lesson. Oscillation is caught, named, and pointed at. WIRES THAT ROUTE THEMSELVES - An A* router lays schematic-grade Z and L routes, detouring only when it must. Move a component and the wires follow, live. - Press ⌘R and a tangle becomes a schematic. Reroutes are deterministic, so you always get the same tidy result. - Bulk Wire: draw one seed wire across a bus, press ⇧⌘R, and the whole bundle fans into a parallel ribbon. - IEEE hop arcs at crossings, KiCad-style pin stubs, and a Route Manually pin for wires you want left exactly as you drew them. 93 COMPONENTS, 2 TO 16 BITS WIDE Gates, flip-flops, latches, counters, registers, ROM and RAM, muxes, decoders, tri-state buffers, splitters, seven-segment and hex displays, dot-matrix and pixel displays, audio, and a full arithmetic shelf: adders, a multiplier and divider, comparators, a barrel shifter, and a 16-operation ALU that prints its current operation right on its face. Plus six annotation tools: text, shapes, lines, and images, so a circuit can explain itself right on the board. LESSONS BUILT IN Made by an engineer who has taught beginners, and remembers what confused them. Guided tutorials and worked example circuits ship inside the app, with explainer cards right on the board. Every component carries its own "What is this?" help. FINDS THE FAULT THAT LOOKS LEAST LIKE A FAULT A status pill reads "All good" until it doesn't. Click it and the Issue Navigator lists every short, oscillation, width mismatch, overlap, and dangling wire, most serious first. Click a row and the board reveals it. Glitches that came and went are tallied, so "it broke but looks fine now" has an answer. BUILD UP WITH SUBCIRCUITS Save a half adder once and drop it into any design as a single block. Subcircuits are live file references: edit the child, and every parent updates. Adders become an ALU. An ALU plus registers becomes a datapath. A REAL MAC APP, TO ITS BONES - Native .logicthing documents with your actual circuit as the Finder thumbnail and in Quick Look - Autosave, Versions, Time Machine, iCloud Drive, Finder tags - Plain, pretty-printed JSON files that diff cleanly in git - Export PNG, JPEG, or true-vector PDF at up to 4× - Full menu bar, right-click surface, and a keyboard shortcut for everything - Liquid Glass, colorblind mode with dash patterns, and a Turbo mode that runs as fast as your Mac can settle it LogicThing began when a career engineer, teaching an intro course, got tired of running a decade-old Java app through a compatibility layer. It's the tool he wanted: fast, native, and beautiful enough to make a student lean in. Whether you're teaching a classroom, taking a course, or finally answering "but how does a computer actually work?", it's built for you. Requires an Apple-silicon Mac running macOS 26 Tahoe or later. Help book, Discord, and support at logicthing.com

NEW IN 1.3 Create Subcircuit from Selection Select part of your circuit and choose Edit > Create Subcircuit from Selection (Option-Command-G). The selection collapses into a single subcircuit, and every signal that crossed its edge becomes a pin. Inputs, Outputs, DIP Switches and LED Bars you selected stay on the board, already wired to the new part. One Undo puts it all back. Two-way pins with the new Port part Place a Port inside a subcircuit to make a pin that signals can flow through in either direction. A shared data bus, like a RAM's data lines, can now cross a subcircuit boundary, with parts inside and outside taking turns driving it. A Port shows the value on its wire, and you choose its width (1 to 16 bits) and which side of the subcircuit its pin appears on. Bus pins for subcircuits DIP Switch (Bus) and LED Bar can now be multi-bit subcircuit pins. A new "Subcircuit pin" checkbox in the Inspector decides which parts become pins. While you're looking inside a subcircuit, its pins wear a pushpin, and pin DIP Switches show the value the parent drives. Subcircuits tab Each subcircuit shows how many times it's used in your document, including inside other subcircuits. Memory Editor - A new Zero button clears a RAM or ROM in one step. - Undo and Redo work inside the Memory Editor. - There's now one Memory Editor window, and it follows whichever document you're working in. - You can open it on memory inside a subcircuit you're viewing. Other improvements - Click or drag a part's label to select or move the part. - B toggles the wire style, and you can switch styles and rotate with R in the middle of a drag. - Zoom to Fit now includes part labels. - The Issue Navigator has a close button. - Bus width markers stay clear of wire hops and corners. Fixes - Toolbar buttons no longer overlap on macOS 27. - New windows no longer jump to an old size and position. - Rotated or mirrored pin parts inside a subcircuit now connect correctly to the parent. - Speed and Settles/s were removed from the info bar. They're in the Performance window.

Information

Seller

David Frey

Category

Developer Tools

Version

1.3

Requires

iOS 26.0+

Size

26.4 MB

Age Rating

4+