
SteamCAD – 2D CAD designed to draw steam locomotives - app4soft
https://github.com/oskardolch/SteamCAD
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mmastrac
I love how specific yet comprehensive this package is. The manual appears to
be lovingly crafted and from what I can tell, well written [1].

I don't know how many people are specifically looking to draw CAD diagrams of
steam locomotives, but I absolutely love that this was someone's itch to
scratch and they put so much time into this.

[1]
[https://github.com/oskardolch/SteamCAD/blob/master/SteamCAD....](https://github.com/oskardolch/SteamCAD/blob/master/SteamCAD.pdf)

~~~
avhon1
One related thing that struck me about SteamCAD was this passage from (the
last page of) the manual:

"5.1 What Next?

Some people may be interested in what are the future plans with SteamCAD. The
answer is there are none. SteamCAD is finished software (the only one in the
whole computer world?), there are no plans to extend it. It does everything it
was supposed to do, if there are bugs in the software, they are now features
of the software.

Well, not quite so. Of course, if the software need some adjustment in the
future to work on new operating systems, it will be updated.

[...]

Despite what was written in the section 5.1, we have published a bunch of
patches in November 2018. The patch includes several bug fixes, improved
precision when snapping to objects and improved handling of paralel curve
copies when the distance grows beyond the smallest curve radius."

This seems like a rare example of software that is not abandoned, but is
"finished", and will suffer no feature creep. It is a romantic idea, for a
piece of software to be conceived for an exact purpose, be programmed until it
exactly fulfills that purpose, and then just be... done, a crystal molded to
its niche.

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nogabebop23
I love the ideal, but unfortunately this is only a characteristic of software
that is not (widely) used. In a combination of the Peter Principle and the Big
Bang, software will be used in an every-expanding array of uses for which it
will attempt to add first-party support until it collapses under it's own mass
and dies a death of ten thousand vertical slice competitors and the process
repeats.

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userbinator
Knuth's TeX is somewhat widely used, yet has the similar characteristic of
approaching stability.

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thaeli
Only because LaTeX is separate and most of the development and new features
happen there.

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chrisseaton
Are there any screenshots? I couldn't find them myself.

The sample output is extraordinarily well-crafted.

Sometimes I think I'd love to write a traditional desktop app like this as a
side project. I haven't done it for years.

~~~
app4soft
> _Are there any screenshots? I couldn 't find them myself._

Here is one screenshot from 2018.[0]

[0]
[https://twitter.com/app4soft/status/1064140024822853633](https://twitter.com/app4soft/status/1064140024822853633)

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polishdude20
So this is just a CAD program that doesn't really have anything special to do
with trains? It's just a barebones CAD program or am I missing something?

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aussiegreenie
Is this the most British software ever?

~~~
vs2
No. A British Flag installer would be

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app4soft
Think, SteamCAD's dev would add it into SteamCAD2[0]

[0]
[https://github.com/oskardolch/SteamCAD2](https://github.com/oskardolch/SteamCAD2)

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zadkey
Is it too sardonic to think that it's only a matter of time before Autodesk
tries to buy this too?

For reference:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodesk#Corporate_acquisition...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodesk#Corporate_acquisitions)

Additional Reference: [https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/sardonic](https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/sardonic)

~~~
snazz
Given that it's more a program for producing art in that style (as opposed to
engineering new trains), they almost certainly won't? Especially since it's
open source.

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wiso
The manual is a great read.

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sdrftr
sl

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m463

      ponythink funny

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Rexxar
Looks interesting but the sample svg image make my Firefox suffers to render
it.

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app4soft
> _sample svg image make my Firefox suffers to render it_

 _Links2_ [0] browser render it without any issues.[1]

[0] [http://links.twibright.com/](http://links.twibright.com/)

[1] [https://i.imgur.com/3UXj3bh.png](https://i.imgur.com/3UXj3bh.png)

~~~
snazz
Is that pseudo-graphical Links output just raw X or something? Is it a wrapper
around a terminal emulator? I also find the "unprecedented visual experience"
part on the homepage to be humorous.

