Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by throw646577 542 days ago
Many, many things have changed since 0.21. There's a radically improved UI themes system (and two new core themes as well as good support for OpenTheme).

There are pretty significant changes to the "fit" of the UI, better preference panels, but there are also significant improvements to UI and tooling in Sketcher, the TNP mitigations mean attaching sketches to surfaces is broadly as safe as it is in other CAD packages, you can directly extrude edge selections in Part Design, there is support (not enabled by default) for multiple separate solids in single bodies in Part Design, pretty major changes in the CAM workbench and architecture workbenches etc.

Most significantly in a workflow sense there's a new core Assembly workbench; combined with the TNP mitigations that is an enormous change.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Dj3p1nCmrE

It's very much not just "under the hood".

Still more things to fix -- lots of stuff has already changed in the 1.1-dev weekly builds.
1 comments
retrochameleon 540 days ago
The visuals of the UI improved, I noticed that, but that's not a UX improvement. Overall UX is the biggest issue, which to me, feels just the same as always.
link
throw646577 540 days ago
Sketcher is considerably better, IMO -- it can do so much more. There's an integrated flow for Sketcher from Part workbench now, too.

(Gets even better in 1.1, too -- and there are new changes coming to the core datums)

I personally don't think overall UX is the biggest problem, if you're prepared to learn it. I've used much worse software than this, and I think a lot of people are just moaning that it isn't "immediate" or "easy". I particularly don't understand criticism of it from the OpenSCAD direction: that's often just misinformed whining from people who hate GUIs and don't believe they can offer anything over text.

Since the new Assembly workbench and the TNP mitigations were added I think it's on pretty solid footing; you can do many things more easily in Part Design now than before, based on geometry edges rather than sketch edges.

One thing I would suggest is using the tab bar workbench selector rather than the dropdown: for some reason that makes the whole thing so much more fluid.

The biggest problem is still, ultimately, robustness.

link