Week highlights: Ondsel is shutting down; new releases of Audacity, Shotcut, fudge, qpwgraph, Qtractor; videos from KiCon Europe 2024; FreeCAD news.
fudge 0.2
Even though the newer official Fujifilm app is surprisingly usable (I can’t say that about the original one), there’s probably a place for an unofficial open-source one, too. This is what fudge is: an early Android application for remote capturing with your Fujifilm cameras. Here is a demo of an earlier version:
Newly released version 0.2 (and its bugfix update) comes with new features and QoL improvements, such as a gallery for downloaded images, mass file importing, better WiFi connectivity, and more. See here for details.
The latest APK is here, but builds are also available on Google Play and F-Droid.
Ondsel is shutting down
Ondsel wasn’t the first company to try building around FreeCAD commercially. But it was one that got a lot of attention, especially after contributing to the first stage of porting RealThunder’s toponaming fixes and then implementing a brand new assembly workbench. And then fixing a bunch of UX/UI issues in Sketcher and TechDraw. And implementing a brand new custom properties system. And being positively contrarian enough to trigger some changes in how FreeCAD operates.
Just like for most other startups out there, the major challenge was finding a product-market fit. This was one of those cases where you talk to a hundred potential customers, and every one of them tells you something that doesn’t match what the other 99 people say. Meanwhile, you are trying to make FreeCAD marketable by adding major missing features and fixing its UX/UI. It was all too much to handle; the company was about to run out of money. So, all operations are now winding down. There will be no Ondsel ES 2024.3, new registrations have already been locked, and the Lens server will eventually stop serving content.
Most of the changes to the FreeCAD code base have already been merged, other are mostly waiting for code review. One last bit is the Reloadable Objects script served by the Lens addon. The team will submit it in a pull request later on.
I got involved with Ondsel around March 2023 to help them with blog content and ended up doing a little more than that. This was a great experience for me, full of challenges. The team is amazing, and I think most of them will stick around FreeCAD. I know I will.
The response I’ve seen so far is amazing. People mostly feel sorry this had to end and express their gratitude to developers. They don’t mention Open Core Ventures much, though, but that’s where the money was coming from! :)
What you as users can do to help FreeCAD is donate to the FreeCAD Project Association.
FreeCAD update
Once again, the list of v1.0 release blockers is down to just three. At any point, the team can decide they are fine with how things are and either cut another release candidate or do the final release.
Meanwhile, pull requests with new features and improvements for the future v1.1 release keep piling up; there are currently 241 of those. If FreeCAD 1.0 was released today and the next Monday merge meeting was all devoted to code review for v1.1, it would take at least 5 extended merge meetings to go through that list. So don’t feel too bad about the Ondsel thing: there’s a lot of development going on.
And a few fun things happening around FreeCAD.
Dave Carter released a major update of his Rocket workbench with two significant changes: support for the new materials system he developed for FreeCAD 1.0 and a directed workflow to set up computational fluid dynamics studies (requires the CfdOF workbench to be installed and configured).
Andrew Shkolik announced FoamCut, a new workbench he developed. It does exactly what it says on the box: creates G-Code for 4- and 5-axis CNC foam cutting machines.
KiCon Europe 2024
Videos from the European KiCad conference are now up on YouTube, here is the playlist, and here is the schedule with slides. The event took place in September in Bochum, Germany.
Here is a talk by Lukas Hartmann about how KiCad enables the open hardware future.
Shotcut 24.10
Dan Dennedy released a new version of Shotcut featuring automatic speech-to-text translation using whisper.cpp. This feature creates a new subtitle track and fills it with recognized subtitles. The program ships with a fairly simple language model, you can download a better one.
The rest of the changes are minor improvements and bug fixes. You will probably only notice the new File > Show Project in Folder menu command. See here for the full list of changes.
Audacity 3.7
This is a maintenance release that, however, ships with a worthwhile change: you can now any changes in the effects stack for a track, such as adding, removing, replacing, and reordering effects. The team also improved the startup speed for systems with many audio devices. Here is the full list of changes.
There will likely be more maintenance releases like that because Audacity 4.0 is far from completion. That’s unsurprising: one doesn’t simply port a huge codebase from one toolkit to another while revamping the UX/UI.
qpwgraph 0.7.9
This program helps manage connections between audio and MIDI ports of hardware and applications when PipeWire is your audio system on Linux. I recently mentioned qpwgraph in a tutorial on recording audio from your browser.
A major new feature in this release is a navigation area called Thumbview. When you zoom into connections, you often stop seeing the entire picture. This is where Thumbview comes in handy: point your mouse where the view should center and click. Dragging the highlighted zone around like in many other applications doesn’t work, at least for now.
Rui also released an update of Qtractor: minor UI and feature improvements, worth upgrading.
Artworks of the week
“The Tavern” by ZiYuan Wang, made with Blender and Photoshop:
“The Cave of Shattered Reflection” by Titas Ženevičius (One Pixel Brush), made with Blender and Photoshop:
“Ocean” by Gurkirat Singh, made with Blender and Krita:
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