I run workshops about the use of modular systems in facilitating non-expert participation in architecture. One I did (at the CAAD Futures Conference in 2023) was with Zometool. It was a blast and really successful.

In preparation I also got to interview the late great Steve Baer, inventor of the Zome (among many other things - seriously look him up, he's one of the most brilliant people of the past 100 years imo). It was a huge honor.

The book chapter the organizers were supposed to do about the conference workshops never materialized (hrmph), but I've done other little collaborative build projects since, so one day I'll document them all together.

I have come to modal editors after decades of modeless, I enjoy them - but respect, understand, and appreciate Tesler's efforts, and I always enjoy reading about them.

As for any After Effects-style NLE capabilities - DaVinci Resolve knocks those out of the park. You'll also probably hear a lot of people singing the praises of Natron for NLE and Motion Graphics, and from our experience with that it seemed like the learning curve was non-trivial, but anything AE (and some aspects of Premiere Pro) could do, it could match... Good luck!

Additionally, Rhino has always been a good drafting tool [1] but my understanding in the current WIP (which if I'm guessing will probably be released as 9.0, within the next 6-12 months) is making a huge push to include better drafting tools. McNeel, the developer, has no plans to go to a subscription model.

[0] https://www.bricsys.com/

[1] https://www.rhino3d.com/

[0] https://x.com/XdanielArt/status/1799474607055102257/photo/1

[1] https://github.com/KenneyNL/Adobe-Alternatives

For example, the GNU Image Manipulation Program now has non-destructive workflows and adjustment layers - and can easily easily be configured with photoshop-like keybinds anyway.

That's not to mention free-to-use tools like Affinity.

The things an architecture student needs it for are:

Photo adjustment:

Lightroom -> Darktable

Photo retouching:

Photoshop -> Affinity Pixel or Gnu Image Manipulation Program

Vector drawing (which for us is mostly processing from 3d modeling programs):

Illustrator -> Affinity Vector or Inkscape

Board and Book Layout

InDesign -> Affinity Layout or Scribus or VivaDesigner

Plus, for motion graphics and video processing, my partner and I have had great luck replacing AfterEffects and Premiere with Blender and DaVinci Resolve, respectively.

And ... believe it or not, I've had excellent luck with LibreOffice Draw as a PDF editor, so anything they would have needed Acrobat Pro for is covered by that (and / or PDF SAM).

The real "sticky wicket" is Revit. Autodesk has been a FAR more abusive company for FAR longer, but it's what we're stuck with - although the emergence of the BIM Workbench (Building Information Modeling) with the release of FreeCAD 1.0 [0] and the continued development of BlenderBIM (oh, now called BonsaiBIM) [1] at least gives some hope.

Anyway, for the Adobe replacements, here's more [2] based on [3]

[0] https://wiki.freecad.org/BIM_Workbench

[1] https://bonsaibim.org/

[2] https://github.com/KenneyNL/Adobe-Alternatives?tab=readme-ov...

[3] https://x.com/XdanielArt/status/1799474607055102257/photo/1

Between this and the fact that they've just 1. Changed all the old accounts to "Adobe Creative Cloud Pro" 2. DOUBLED the monthly fee, now charging you for the AI features whether you want them or not, and 3. Removed any tiers that have full program access but no AI, I am walking away forever when my current month expires.

Not to mention, students now only get the old $19.99 membership for the first year.

I teach visualization and representation tools to architecture students. I had always taught them Adobe products before. Now I can't in good faith sign them up to have their expertise tied to using this program stack forever. So tomorrow I am giving them a lecture on free to use and FOSS versions of the same tools. And I'm going to teach the class from them in perpetuity. Congratulations, Adobe that's 50+ students a year who won't be using your products when they graduate.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47304300

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As a practicing architect (of buildings) I had a special fondness of working on minimalist projects. Buildings are a complex problem space. You typically can't design out unnecessary complexity entirely. So you have to work backward from goals (the finished condition) to infrastructure (the building structure) to figure out how to make the end product look like almost nothing (Mies's "beinahe nichts").

That's all to say that "complexity impresses" as the article says, but the discerning understand that simplicity can be even more impressive.

It also puts me in the frame of mind of another famous one - Fred Brooks's "No Silver Bullet" [1] and the idea of essential vs. accidental complexity. Or as I like to think of it in a slightly more nuanced way - not necessarily "accidental" but at least "incidental."

[0] https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

[1] https://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks_1986_-_No_Silver_Bullet.p...

Legends Never Die.

I would wager good money that the proliferation of em-dashes we see in LLM-generated text is due to the fact that there are so many correctly used em-dashes in publicly-available text, as auto-corrected by Word...

[0] https://historyofthegermans.com/hanseatic-league/

I forget the source of that, but it makes me chuckle.

He was one of the true greats, and thank you again for sharing.

When other architects aren't familiar with his genius, I explain that he taught Drop City how to build domes - which is the architectural equivalent of teaching Johnny Ramone how to play a power chord. RIP to one of the absolute giants.

Default text in the terminal is green, and if I select it with a mouse it's magenta. It's more of a "terminal" vibe than the win 3.1 Fluorescent vibe. I said that because they share garish colors.

Also, I'm always on the lookout for even more minimalist graphics to use in my config, if anyone has hyper-minimal things they like about theirs...