[vejmarie]

I am one of the FreeCAD developper (vejmarie). I believe some good innovations are coming up within the next release. I recently added some Cloud features with storage capabilities directly to s3, opening doors to build a collaborative platform (I am working on a mockup). Waevfront OBJ exporter has been improved allowing some direct export to webGL format and many other things. Regarding the features, an assembly workbench is under work, and some fancy stuff have been designed with FreeCAD (there is some Renault Twizy design files available). The FeM workbench with OpenFoam bridge allows also to initiate some simulation model. FreeCAD has in its backend a lot of capabilities that we can expose to end user. We are lacking from good feedback on the UI other than we are not yet reaching Solidworks, but FreeCAD is today a solution which works on Mac, Windows, Linux, has an open file format (Brep shape and XML representation), and is fully open source. We made tremendous progress since version 0.16 and there is a strong wish to bring in innovation regarding design workflow. Just tell us what might be your best tools and we can try to do it !

[Robotbeat]

As someone who uses FreeCAD on and off, I thank you very much for your efforts! There are a lot of features.

It is definitely not lack of features that holds FreeCAD back, though. It is the UI/usability/stability. In fact, I'd prefer a solution WITHOUT cloud features as it's a liability in my profession, and in general ends up putting an expiration date on the program (as eventually servers get turned off, etc).

Again, thank you SO much for your efforts.

[vejmarie]

You are welcome. The Cloud implementation I made, is fully compatible with the minio server which is an open source implementation of s3 written in Go, meansing that you can keep everything in house and this was something super important to me. FreeCAD is a huge piece of software. Thanks for your support ! I agree with you we change too much things but since 0.17 we moved to something more modular with new object which were reuired to implement a descent assembly workbench. This is done and I do not think this is going to change that much anymore (but who knows) ;) We will do it the best as we can for sure.