Weekly recap — 13 April 2025

Week highlights: new releases of Pinta and Elektroid, FreeCAD Project Association announces new grants.

Pinta 3.0

The new version of the image editor comes with a GTK4/libadwaita port, UI revamp with functionality moved to the headerbar, new effects, add-ins support restored, and various quality-of-life improvements. Full review is already available here.

FreeCAD

The FreeCAD project Association members has voted for grants in the first quarter of 2025. Expect this work:

• Two new types of curves for Sketcher
• Further improvements in the FEM workbench
• Modernized rendering and selection systems + new renderer for Coin
• The foundation for multi-threading and asynchronous document/objects recomputation

Additionally, a former Ondsel developer will resume his work on Lens, the FreeCAD-centric online PDM system developed by the company, to make it self-hostable. The funds for this project come from a separate source.

Elektroid 3.2

This FOSS replacement for Elektron Transfer has been updated and now ships with Digitone II support. The CLI version now also supports backing up your data (recursively downloading it, really). The rest of the changes are fixes.

If you don’t want to build Elektroid from source code, there’s a flatpak build on Flathub.

Shortcircuit XT

It’s been a while since I last talked about this free and open-source sampler. The Surge XT team refocused on this project around 2022 and dropped active work on Monique and Stochas. A lot has happened since then. The sampler now has rudimentary support for SF2, SFZ, and GIG sample libraries. The UI looks mostly complete but has a ton of placeholders because a lot of the planned functionality is missing.

It’s going to be a long time before Shortcircuit XT can be recommended as a tool of the trade. Still, the fact that you can actually get some sounds out of it is kinda exciting.

Artworks

South of Midnight - Chapter 9 - Of Webs and Woman by Samir Ahmed Yahia, made with Blender, Substance Painter, and Unreal Engine:

Tower by Zp Zhang, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Abandoned Ancient Gate by Greg Westphal, made with Blender:

Verdant Utopia by Yota Tasaki, made with Blender and Unreal Engine:

Patreon subscribers get early access to my posts. If you are feeling generous, you can also make a one-time donation on BuyMeACoffee.