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> I wonder what will be the next category of open source to pull ahead?
KiCad, for PCB design. They have been making massive improvements over the last few years, and with proprietary solutions shutting down (Eagle) or being unaffordable (Altium) Kicad is now by far the best option for both hobbyists and small companies.
With the release of KiCad 5 in 2018 it went from being "a pain to use to, but technically sufficient" to being a genuine option for less-demanding professionals. Since then they've been absolutely killing it, with major releases happening once a year and bringing enough quality-of-life improvements that it is actually hard to keep track of all of them.
From the type of new features it is very obvious that a lot of professional users are now showing interest in the application, and as we've seen with Blender a trickle of professional adoption can quickly turn into a flood which takes over the entire market.
KiCad still has a long way to go when it comes to complex high-speed boards (nobody in their right mind would use it to design an EPYC motherboard, for example), but it is absolutely going to steamroll the competition when it comes to the cookie-cutter 2/4/6 layer PCBs in all the everyday consumer products.
KiCAD becomes better and better, but one limitation embedded into its DNA is very annoying: one project - one schematic - one PCB.
It is very kludgy and cumbersome to split project into several PCB (for example, stack of PCBs connected by backplane or headers, like Arduino & Shield for it) and/or to have variations of the PCBs for one schematics, like TH and SMD variants of the PCB for exactly same schematics.
Even in my very modest almost-electrical (as opposed to electronic) projects I need one or another from time to time.
As far as I understand it is limitation which is not easy to fix, because all architecture of KiCAD is based on this 1-1-1 principle.
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The great thing about TIF was it's extensibility. Flexible (data could be stored as tiles or in stripes), multiple compression options etc.
Well documented spec, easy to bolt on extras either as public tags - GeoTIFFs added projection metadata - or private, for your own needs.
Back in the day, to improve a desktop application's performance I found it was simple to create a custom reader and writer to handle cases where tiles were completely one single colour removing the need to decompress at run time.
Thank you TIFf!
Unfortunately, it doesn't help.
Almost any digital camera RAW format is TIFF inside. And you can see how much kludges good metadata library needs to read all of them: offsets from the IFD, offsets from beginning of file with or without header, offsets from fields in IFD, etc, etc, etc. You take TIFF, you change header to make your format, and then you cannot implement this TIFF properly!
Even DNG (which is tiff inside) is mangled by camera firmware authors!
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blacklion commented on When stick figures fought animationobsessive.substa... · Posted by u/ani_obsessive
I remember series of stick man fighting cartoons which starts from simple kung-fu/gun porno in big office tower of (presumably) evil corporation, but progressed to some infernal fights, with Jesus, ghosts, hell, etc.
I'm not sure it was XiaoXiao, I (don't) remember some other letter combination in the names of files.
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My wife is very sensitive to glossy screens and we have big problems to find new laptop for her, as most good ones are glossy now.