FreeCAD is fairly good. Some of the controls are a bit wonky, but that is just a minor gripe. If you are starting on FreeCAD, that doesn’t matter so much. FreeCAD is good to know if you design components for KiCAD as well.
Parametric modeling is fucking awesome, btw. I am not quite sure how old that concept is though.
Yeah if you want to be reductive about it, FreeCAD is a GUI wrapper for OpenCASCADE, its CAD engine. FreeCAD is designed to be extensible; the workbench system allows for several different workflows, and using the Python API it’s not that far out there to make your own workbench for specialized tasks. You could build a clockwork workbench if you were interested in designing escapements and such.
The tradeoff is it can seem overhwelming because there’s a LOT of functionality in there. I do almost all of my work in the Spreadsheet, Sketcher and Part Design workbench, plus the A2Plus assembly workbench from the addon manager.
Curious to hear what it’s like making parts with a spreadsheet. Is it like coding?
I use openscad a lot, and just tried using spreadsheets – adding parameters to each property in a part still seems really clunky, compared to editing a scad file in Emacs, which I vastly prefer, especially now that there’s AI code autocomplete.
I use the spreadsheet to hold dimensions/variable and formulas, makes it easier to modify designs. If I want to change a length, hole size height etc just change the spreadsheet values don’t have to mess around with the sketches or 3d part designs directly.
One slightly frustrating thing i found is sometimes it fails to recompute the design or processes it incorrectly when values are changed by large amounts, that’s probably more to do with how I design things though
Seems like a good opportunity to ask if anyone can recommend learning materials for FreeCAD? Used Solidworks and AutoCAD in school but fell back on tinkercad for a recent project just cause I didn’t have time to invest in learning.
Parametric is such a leap, when coming from toy blocks like TinkerCad in which I can really easily do all that I want except those sexy fillets…
I really want to learn it but it feels so convoluted and difficult. I’m aware that FreeCAD is not the easiest, and some commercial packages are easier to grok but their licensing is really hostile to simple hobbyists so I am trying to to take the high road, for now anyway.
As an avid NewPipe user I like that it’s an approximately identical tool with more functionality!
It seems like a fork where (I wish) a plugin could (ideally) be in NewPipe. It may also be a nice nod to the original devs to change the default color scheme of the fork so nobody gets confused as to who forked from who.
Overall very cool work! I hope they continue to have success and make progress.
I have gotten my friend group to switch to using Signal for our group chat. It was pretty hard because I’m the only Android user but I ended up convincing them
There’s not really much of a point using the RCS Test app, as it’s only a demo of very basic RCS features.
The thing with RCS is that whilst the “official” spec (ie the Universal Profile), as defined by the GSM Alliance, is open, it doesn’t implement or define many modern of the chat features found in modern apps, such as reactions, replies, end-to-end encryption etc. These features however, have been implemented by Google in their Messages app and their Jibe backed service. The problem is that these additions by Google are proprietary and only works via Google’s Messages app, so third-party messaging apps can’t get in on the fun.
I believe Samsung’s Messages app may also have access to some(?) of these features if the cellular carrier also uses Google’s Jibe servers for RCS routing, but don’t quote me on that.
As for Apple, I’m pretty sure that if they implement RCS (supposedly this year), it’ll either be the Universal Profile, or most likely the Universal Profile + some proprietary Apple magic sauce for added features. Not sure about E2E encryption though - they would have to work with Google for that to work (for interoperability with Messages), so we’ll have to see how that goes. If I were to guess, I’d say E2E on Apple would most likely be limited to Apple devices. But at least we can expect basic rich messaging features to work cross-platform, so that’s something I guess.
In any case, the main issue remains that Google hasn’t opened up the API/spec for their version of RCS - and the GSMA is seemingly doing nothing about it either, the Universal Profile hasn’t had any updates in the last four years. You can read about the spec in detail here, and if you do, you’ll see that there’s no mention of modern chat features such as end-to-end encryption…
So on one hand, it’s a good thing that Apple is getting RCS this year, but it’ll likely remain either the at the basic Universal Profile level, or some proprietary Apple stuff thrown in, both of which aren’t really ideal.
For the rest of us, none of this really matters unless Google opens up the spec, because why the heck would you settle for a somewhat insecure and limited protocol, when there are far better messaging apps out there, with a greater userbase and cross-platform interoperability?
So on one hand, it’s a good thing that Apple is getting RCS this year, but it’ll likely remain either the at the basic Universal Profile level, or some proprietary Apple stuff thrown in, both of which aren’t really ideal.
No, I would say the first is the best option. It would create incentive for actually improving the Universal Profile. The “bad ending” would be Apple adopting Google’s proprietary extensions.
I used Inkscape a lot on PDFs with forms and broken layout. The beauty of it, you can fix other problems, too, use your own font or change the font of existing text. (:
having layering(hope that the right word for a group of text, icons and symbols) issue where icons and symbols go missing or get replaced by square boxes
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