<story><title>Fornjot – The world needs another CAD program</title><url>https://github.com/hannobraun/Fornjot</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fps-hero</author><text>I love solvespace, the UI is quick, minimal and easy to come up to speed with.&lt;p&gt;I use it as a 2D parametric sketch pad, for 2D designs for laser cutting, making 3D models for kicad, and a few basic 3D printed fixtures, but it is in no way a replacement for even Freecad.&lt;p&gt;The constraints are feature complete, but minimal. Some basic geometry is often a pain to get setup. Once you hit 3D you’ll realise that your basically limited to extruding and revoking sketches. Still a powerful tool but not suitable for serious mechanical design.&lt;p&gt;What world really needs is for FreeCad to be as usable is it’s paid equivalents. I don’t understand why free software always neglects the UI. How hard is it to even simply copy the time tested work flows in proprietary software. Once you learn Solidworks, Inventor, or Fusion 360, you can pickup any other parametric modeller.&lt;p&gt;Code as CAD as an idea I believe is flawed. It doesn’t solve any of the hard problems of mechanical design. Designing physical objects requires good visualisations and iterative feedback. I.e changing this dimension solves this interference in a complex assembly. Besides, most mechanical engineering are not proficient coders.</text></item><item><author>TaylorAlexander</author><text>“Code-cad” as they put it clearly appeals to a lot of people, and more CAD is good. But as a long time mechanical engineer and robotics engineer what I really want is a completely open source parametric cad program that is as good as Solidworks or OnShape. FreeCAD is an impressive project but clearly needs more resources to ever compete. Solvespace seems cool and I want to play with it more, but I can’t comment on how good it is as I have only tinkered. I do wish the Solvespace UI was more akin to tools I am familiar with (OnShape or Solidworks).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>regularfry</author><text>&amp;gt; What world really needs is for FreeCad to be as usable is it’s paid equivalents. I don’t understand why free software always neglects the UI.&lt;p&gt;My observation is that the problem isn&amp;#x27;t that the UI is neglected, it&amp;#x27;s that almost any suggestion to improve it gets bogged down in community objections.  There&amp;#x27;s always &lt;i&gt;someone&lt;/i&gt; on the forums who&amp;#x27;ll defend some aspect of the status quo (usually a vocal minority), either on the basis that &amp;quot;the problem is intrinsically complicated so a complicated UI is inevitable, so stop complaining&amp;quot; (which is, for the record, utter nonsense), or &amp;quot;we can&amp;#x27;t know if the change breaks someone&amp;#x27;s workflow&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;we need to expose the implementation details so you know what&amp;#x27;s going on&amp;quot; (again, nonsense).&lt;p&gt;What you end up with is evangelists on Twitter calling out for more contributions, and the community shouting down contributions which would actually help.  The whole thing&amp;#x27;s fundamentally broken not because the code can&amp;#x27;t be written, or because the ideas aren&amp;#x27;t out there, but because it&amp;#x27;s incredibly hard to make progress unless you&amp;#x27;re already a core developer (which, yes, there are too few of).</text></comment>
<story><title>Fornjot – The world needs another CAD program</title><url>https://github.com/hannobraun/Fornjot</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fps-hero</author><text>I love solvespace, the UI is quick, minimal and easy to come up to speed with.&lt;p&gt;I use it as a 2D parametric sketch pad, for 2D designs for laser cutting, making 3D models for kicad, and a few basic 3D printed fixtures, but it is in no way a replacement for even Freecad.&lt;p&gt;The constraints are feature complete, but minimal. Some basic geometry is often a pain to get setup. Once you hit 3D you’ll realise that your basically limited to extruding and revoking sketches. Still a powerful tool but not suitable for serious mechanical design.&lt;p&gt;What world really needs is for FreeCad to be as usable is it’s paid equivalents. I don’t understand why free software always neglects the UI. How hard is it to even simply copy the time tested work flows in proprietary software. Once you learn Solidworks, Inventor, or Fusion 360, you can pickup any other parametric modeller.&lt;p&gt;Code as CAD as an idea I believe is flawed. It doesn’t solve any of the hard problems of mechanical design. Designing physical objects requires good visualisations and iterative feedback. I.e changing this dimension solves this interference in a complex assembly. Besides, most mechanical engineering are not proficient coders.</text></item><item><author>TaylorAlexander</author><text>“Code-cad” as they put it clearly appeals to a lot of people, and more CAD is good. But as a long time mechanical engineer and robotics engineer what I really want is a completely open source parametric cad program that is as good as Solidworks or OnShape. FreeCAD is an impressive project but clearly needs more resources to ever compete. Solvespace seems cool and I want to play with it more, but I can’t comment on how good it is as I have only tinkered. I do wish the Solvespace UI was more akin to tools I am familiar with (OnShape or Solidworks).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ur-whale</author><text>&amp;gt;Code as CAD as an idea I believe is flawed.&lt;p&gt;Strongly disagree, the typical problems one has with designing objects and mechanisms in CAD tools are &lt;i&gt;extremely&lt;/i&gt; similar to the problems software engineers have.&lt;p&gt;Parametric design, for example, is nothing but a program whose inputs change and whose outputs are 3D model.&lt;p&gt;Versioning is another obvious example.&lt;p&gt;Parts reuse yet another.&lt;p&gt;Test driven design.&lt;p&gt;Automated testing.&lt;p&gt;The list is very long.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Designing physical objects requires good visualisations and iterative feedback&lt;p&gt;True, but I fail to see how that is incompatible with code as CAD.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Besides, most mechanical engineering are not proficient coders.&lt;p&gt;In the 80&amp;#x27;s most traditional film animators had never touched a computer. These folks are now either out of a job or have switched to using computers.&lt;p&gt;The fact that mechanical engineers aren&amp;#x27;t proficient coders is a symptom of the fact that proper &amp;#x27;code as CAD&amp;#x27; tools don&amp;#x27;t exist yet, not a law of physics.&lt;p&gt;When such tools start to reach maturity, you will see - just like it happened in film animation - a whole new generation of mechanical engineer pick up the new tools and beat the pants of the old way of doing things.</text></comment>