Star Simpson

Been thinking about that as analogous to @Glitch. The time for this *has* to be coming.

I keep thinking about this too. For every 20 teams working on better programming tools I know of 0.2 trying to make life better for other engineers.

I used to think this was bottlenecked by the difficulty of mastering 3D programming, perhaps.

I now think that two cultural factors are likely just as big an issue: vendor lock-in taking air out of the room for innovation and the assumption that all engineers can improve their own tools, so “other engineering” gets little love from the software world. Maybe.

Until it's possible to make it truly collaborative it's tough to make a case for starting from scratch on a tool for an expert audience. I've been watching @figmadesign slowly take over. Users compromise on features and switch their habits only if they're getting something better

I am biased, but I entirely love what @Podaris is doing with in-browser CAD for urban planning. @nkoren and co are making that specific type of CAD intuitive and powerful.

Thank you sir! It's a tough job but somebody's gotta do it. BTW we're deploying a major upgrade in about 4 hours, during what was *supposed* to be our lowest-usage period, so I really hope your tweet doesn't suddenly send a bunch of traffic our way.

This is one of the few applications where I can imagine some startup coming out with a VR app that suddenly makes this accessible to a wide audience. In particular, handling perspective becomes immediately intuitive.

Have you heard of #madewithblocks? https://vr.google.com/blocks  Allows you to model in 3D space in VR and make things like what you see here: https://poly.google.com/blocks  :)

Yes it's super cool, but ultimately a toy. Anyone using it to truly create is exporting and touching up in desktop tools. At least all examples I've seen. But it's a taste of the future, for sure.

I am of course biased (I am the PM for Blocks) but I’ve seen many creators do amazing things with the tool without needing to edit elsewhere. @djcarson, @3Donimus and @JarlanPerez are great examples! But I get this is not the case for every use case where you need a 3D model

I can testify that I do not touch up my #MadeWithBlocks models before I post them. What you see in Poly is what was created in Blocks.

Beautiful work @djcarson! I was only speaking to work I've seen in passing, some amazing stuff but had always been touched up. Your work is at another level

I just started teaching myself some CAD and I was pretty surprised that there’s pretty much only Onshape and Fusion360 if you don’t want to pay like $8000. And after those, all the open source CAD choices are super clunky and most are 2D only.

Did you try http://ascon.net/download/kompas/ …, I worked with it back to 2000s, it was good enough at that time.