Comment by rcarmo
Comment by rcarmo 7 days ago
Impressive, but I don't see any way to do constraints or sketches.
(I'm also a bit sad that this is a web app, but, alas, such is progress.)
Comment by rcarmo 7 days ago
Impressive, but I don't see any way to do constraints or sketches.
(I'm also a bit sad that this is a web app, but, alas, such is progress.)
It simplifies things for schools, because everything is easily managed, everything integrates with Google classroom, and the hardware is fungible, you can log into any one and have your files.
It doesn't train them how to use real computers, but that's not on the state standards so they don't care.
Google Classroom is the worst LMS I've ever used and the "log in from any machine and have your files" thing was solved by Active Directory decades ago...
The reasons schools ate them up os because they're cheap and were the most readily available laptops during a shortage. I really doubt much else was on anyone's mind.
I also have a few qualms with it:
1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.
Let the kids make websites?!
I love web based software (minus the logins). This saves soooo much time in a teaching environment. Time that can me used for teaching ideas, approaches, rather than struggling with compatibility issues.
I think a set of problems where you intentionally create failures and then work through solving them would be quite interesting for anyone learning geometry, beyond a certain point. Understanding exactly why the failures are failures, what about the geometry or the computation makes them fail, would help build an intuition for geometry and topology itself.
Yep! Would love to try this once he or she adds parametric. We need good-quality reasonably-priced software in this domain.
Browsers can be just as powerful as 'native' apps. This is an example of that. Browser apps free the user from proprietary operating systems and their companies. Of course, Linux is a way around that. However, why not just write it once and let students and engineers the world over be able to share and open files easily?
UPDATE: On my newer laptop thius is faster than my native apps. And I was literally drawing shapes within 30 seconds of clicking on the link to this app. Compare that to the nightmare of all the other tools out there with registrations, email clutter, 2FA, and on and on. Oh, and cost in most cases!
UPDATE 2: I have no connection to this team other than having just seen a post online about this tool. I've been navigating the world of SketchUp/AutoCad/Revit recently so this of course is totally thrilling. Especially for what it means for the future.
This is just blatantly wrong. There are so many native resources that any serious 3D application requires access to that are blocked by browsers that this statement just isn't true and never will be.
Out of curiosity, what native resources are needed? It seems Solidworks mainly needs access to the file system, GPU, and perhaps networking. GPU and networking in the browser, and the file handling could be implemented over the network instead of locally.
For most current pro CAD, certainly there are a lot of calls to Win32 libraries on Windows, but those aren't fundamentally needed by a CAD system. There was professional 3D CAD before Windows.
I don't know what native hardware would be needed that isn't already accessible through current Chrome?
There is the full power of CUDA kernels, for starters. Then there's a lot of potential low level optimizations that browsers don't enable that can easily make a 2x to 10x performance difference. Also, there is no good way to give hard bounds on memory usage.
That's why I said 'can'. Once OS's lift restrictions on what browsers can access then we'll finally have something more close to 'write once run everywhere'. But that wouldn't really help the proprietary software systems and companies.
As someone who works in a school with Chromebooks, I love that web apps like this exist, especially if students will be able to export the files to a 3D printer. It greatly opens up the number of tools we can use to do fun things.
That said, also as a teacher and a parent, I worry that Chromebooks are making kids have no idea about the world of non-web-apps. (And file systems, etc. etc.)
I watch my kid create a poster: find an image online, copy & paste into an automatic background remover, c&p into an image editing program to remove the watermark, c&p into Canva for assembling with text etc.
Meanwhile I show her that I can do the whole thing on Pixelmator Pro (or Affinity or Photoshop) and she looks at me like I have three heads.