I use GIMP and FreeCAD quite often and find them very powerful programs, but maybe I'm some sort of genius? I think where these programs don't do well is among the crowd who expect to be able to just click around an advanced piece of software and somehow it just works to get things done! For basic apps this is a reasonable expectation, but CAD is not a simple process.
PS: I've still not managed to learn Blender, not put enough hours in, it is a hugely complex beast of a program that basically requires keyboard shortcut use imho. That interface (beautiful as it is) has so many options that even if I know what I'm looking for I can't find it!
Part of what made Blender accessible around 2001-2002 when I was using it regularly was a really great paperback book[1] that served as a tutorial and reference. The UX was strange to be sure but after reading through the ~200 pages and getting acclimatized, it all began to feel sensible. If not for that book I would have bounced off Blender and never looked back.
OpenSCAD is ideal for making models that can be modified! You have to program your models with the mindset of parametric CAD though, if I was making a battery case I would start by defining variables for battery length, diameter and count and work from there.
Very few people are using C for `quality-of-life features`. I'm fairly certain I've never even seen any C23 code, is it supported by many compilers or C tooling? One of the great things about C is that it is fairly easy to write code that runs everywhere and for a library that is especially important. There are many who just stick to C89.
I'll burn what little karma I have and say that for market insights and interesting perspectives, x.com is the best place (manual curation required). Beyond that you should be watching earnings calls each quarter for a range of companies in the market. Most of what is written here, in the press and on reddit is complete nonsense.
preditor: A simple image viewer that shows each image in the center of the screen in a window sized for that image with some basic editing functions built in.
https://github.com/rabfulton/preditor
PS: I've still not managed to learn Blender, not put enough hours in, it is a hugely complex beast of a program that basically requires keyboard shortcut use imho. That interface (beautiful as it is) has so many options that even if I know what I'm looking for I can't find it!
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