Can we discuss GetCraft apps and the beginning of Slopware movement?
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If you haven't heard of it, you should look into it. Some dude in the US with a claude account basically reverse engineered (he says - I don't buy it) all the Adobe apps in just a few months (he says - I don't buy it). It sucks valuable oxygen away from products like VStyler. But I'd love to hear what @vectorstyler, the engineer, thinks.
https://www.reddit.com/r/FuckAdobe/comments/1xb3fvb/all_the_getcraft_slopware_post_is_disheartening/ - I wrote a scathing post here.
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@Daniel Hi Daniel. I read your post, agree with lot of things you said. I have installed the "thingcraft", and tested it a little. But i dont feel the same enthusiasm using it as with my other software. I love when Inkscape update, and a new thing is implemented. Love to read about it, to see the community behind it. Same thing here, with VS. Love to see the developer taking care, the users giving feedback and be heard. With Affinity im loving how the scripting has made lot of users part of the programming enviroment.
But with the craft apps, i dont feel that enthusiasm. I checked their discord forum, with people asking "clone now this or that". I think in communities like Krita, Inkscape, Gimp, being affected in their development because this clones. One community that actively rejected the "clone" was KVRAudio. The ProTools clone mimics the original, but a DAW is something much more beyond the GUI. That is something that make you think. I open "PhotoCraft" the same ugly gui than photoshop. You need not to learn, they say. But what will they do when Adobe launch a new version? copy all the improvements? That is "develope"?
Can we go back to the past, please? Appear not... -
@marce: Yup. Fully agree. Thinking critically is an art form. And very few possess it. Far from engineers making the tool, it is the users who make the tool. Photoshop started as a pet project of two brothers, one of whom, working for George Lucas of Star Wars fame, kept pushing the other to add features to his greyscale image viewer for Macintosh. Without the other brother telling him what needs to happen, the engineer would have been lost. That's the secret to great software. Engineering solves the math, but users provide the problem for maths to solve!
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My question is: what kind of monsters are we actually feeding
when we use these AI tools?What is the point of trying to spite Adobe on the one hand, while simultaneously
propping up AI—or the tech giants behind it—by using their products?After all, Adobe’s sphere of influence is still somewhat limited. AI, by contrast, poses a
threat to our entire society and could leave us at the mercy of tech dictators.One only needs to look around to see that employees are already being monitored
by AI in the workplace; it should be clear that the real battlegrounds lie elsewhere entirely. -
@Subpath: Agreed. Albeit, I am not also convinced that out and out anti-AI argument either. Simple reason. You can use Unsloth, for instance, download the whole AI LLM on your desktop (you must have a muscular GPU) and create a firewall rule for the application. Now you have an LLM that sends zero telemetry to providers. You can even train models with your own data on your own computer. This is what I've been trying to do. I have a monstrously powerful laptop. This one --> Work: Windows 11 | Intel i9 14900HS (24 Cores/32 Threads) | GeForce RTX 4070 | 64 GB RAM. I intend to use it purely as a AI lab for my ideas. I see no harm in this. Do you?
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If one look for a way to make the use of AI justifiable, one will certainly find one,
and it is surely possible to try to mitigate the risks.In my view, however, this does not really change the fundamental problems associated with AI.
I am certainly not someone who is hostile toward technology. Yet, amidst all the enthusiasm, one
ought to take a closer look at what lies behind it—and never lose sight of whether the future we
are heading toward is truly the one we want for ourselves and for those who come after us -
@Subpath: But AI has already existed for ages. For decades. Games use AI for NPC for decades. Even very old games. The only difference we have now is the size and type of AI. That's it. By running AI on your computer, you take power away from providers. I see zero problem with this.
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I have absolutely no problem if others hold different opinions;
these are simply my own thoughts on the matter.
There are certainly some helpful tasks that AI can handle.My concern is more about the capabilities/power that AI places in the hands
of people who might not have the best intentions.Then again, it doesn’t even have to be someone with malicious intent;
a simple mistake may be enough. -
I tested the latest VectorCraft and was really impressed, because it solves two VectorStyler's biggest problems:
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Preferences > Scale Strokes & Effects checkbox that works exactly like Illustrator's. This is essential for complex vector illustration and VectorStyler still doesn't have this crucial Illustrator's feature
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Blazing fast typing performance in complex artwork that contains thousands of text characters. Typing in VectorStyler with this type of complex document is excruciatingly slow and it hasn't been fixed for years
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@gotanidea Text is indeed the Achilles heel of VS. Here, the dev must spend time not looking at Adobe, but at Xara's handling of text. It is about as intuitive as text handling ever got in 30+ years within a vector app. Also, PL has a superb Text on Path feature that remains unrivalled. It allows you to mount a single curve with multiple lines of text and deal with them each individually. Text on curve distortion, baseline shifts, and repetition (where a single word can repeat multiple times around a curve) is handled with elegance found elsewhere. If I had a few hours, I can provide some highly valuable pointers on how to make it easier. I already have in the mega thread. The answers are in Xara.
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@Daniel I would be interested to know what to improve on the Text on Path feature.
There is already multiple line handling and bending the text along the path (instead of just aligning).
