Hi, I use LDCad from a year or so. To me it's a light UI that looks CAD-like rather than something else. I love it. I did not have much issues with it. I have worked with PTC and other professional CAD tools, mainly for modelling purposes. I have picked LDCad after trying many Lego tools.
The menus are really fine for me, I love they float and can be moved without closing (as native ones would do).
From my experience, a custom UI is better than standard ones. I've seen GTK apps that must compoly to Gnome standards, this spoiling my experience. For insatnce sticking to shortcuts and removing toolbars icons, like save, for instance, or selecting operations. This made my life hard.
Now, my experience with LDCad, I have faced some issues too:
- some number localization errors due to the "." vs ",". I have English as UI language, but Romania as region, under KDE. So comma is for decimal.
- I have needed several times to compare models, so I would like so much having few instances of LDCad at once, at least 2, not switching from one model to another. I use two displays too, would help me a lot to have one LDCad open on each. Also, I don't like the idea of working exclusively in fullscreen. Sometimes it is useful to consult some original manual during building virtually and I like to switch.
- sometimes snapping is hard, especially when needing angles (for instance 9398 chassy around the battery). I still can't find the right way, rotating after calcualting the angles is not real snapping.
- I'd like more palette views, I use more than 6 categories for technic. I also need to be careful to avoid paticular printed parts (like technic beam 3 with "40 1977 - 2017" text etc.). These should be somewhere else or be possible to filter them out.
- Setting submodels centers it's a mistery to me, I can't make it clearly, sometimes they remain with some center away from the submodel itself...
- I'd like to have a compatible parts list export for all the model or submodels, I use stud.io for that in a convoluted way (sending it to them, not publishing, adding it to the wishlist, making the parts list there etc..)
- a powerful feature would be a function to relate parts in a way that moves them when needed when a different part is chosen in place of some part of the model... but this is complicated even to define...
This is my list, if I have new ideas, I might add to it here...
Thank you for the great application!
The menus are really fine for me, I love they float and can be moved without closing (as native ones would do).
From my experience, a custom UI is better than standard ones. I've seen GTK apps that must compoly to Gnome standards, this spoiling my experience. For insatnce sticking to shortcuts and removing toolbars icons, like save, for instance, or selecting operations. This made my life hard.
Now, my experience with LDCad, I have faced some issues too:
- some number localization errors due to the "." vs ",". I have English as UI language, but Romania as region, under KDE. So comma is for decimal.
- I have needed several times to compare models, so I would like so much having few instances of LDCad at once, at least 2, not switching from one model to another. I use two displays too, would help me a lot to have one LDCad open on each. Also, I don't like the idea of working exclusively in fullscreen. Sometimes it is useful to consult some original manual during building virtually and I like to switch.
- sometimes snapping is hard, especially when needing angles (for instance 9398 chassy around the battery). I still can't find the right way, rotating after calcualting the angles is not real snapping.
- I'd like more palette views, I use more than 6 categories for technic. I also need to be careful to avoid paticular printed parts (like technic beam 3 with "40 1977 - 2017" text etc.). These should be somewhere else or be possible to filter them out.
- Setting submodels centers it's a mistery to me, I can't make it clearly, sometimes they remain with some center away from the submodel itself...
- I'd like to have a compatible parts list export for all the model or submodels, I use stud.io for that in a convoluted way (sending it to them, not publishing, adding it to the wishlist, making the parts list there etc..)
- a powerful feature would be a function to relate parts in a way that moves them when needed when a different part is chosen in place of some part of the model... but this is complicated even to define...
This is my list, if I have new ideas, I might add to it here...
Thank you for the great application!