Show HN: Graphite, a Blender-inspired 2D procedural design Rust app

Wow this looks fantastic! Good open-source tools for design are so necessary [1].

You should probably add Graphite to this list [2]. I'll definitely try Graphite and follow its progress.

Good luck!

--

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lthVYUB8JLs

2: https://github.com/KenneyNL/Adobe-Alternatives

Adding to the above, in a way this can also be self hosted and is a candidate for the awesome selfhosted list [1].

1. https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

Thanks! I'll open it up to the community to suggest Graphite's inclusion in lists like that one but I'll abstain from doing that myself. I should mention that, at the present moment, the only category we'd appropriately fit under is the Illustrator alternatives. Next year we will be building towards raster editing as our next core competency, but vector editing is the only one we've focused on so far.

It looks like that list tends more towards home-server self-hosted SaaS kinds of software rather than desktop apps. With our upcoming desktop app, and the fact that you can install it right now as a PWA, there's really no benefit from self-hosting. Your data is already client-side, so there's nothing for the server to do besides act as a CDN and send some tiny static assets. Unless people are going somewhere without internet, there's really no point in self-hosting the static files instead of using our CDN. Since we don't even have a server backend (except for a proxy to the Google Fonts API which we need to keep our API key private).

I (mis?)understood one of the features for 1.0 "Cloud document storage" as some sort of custom storage server, webdav or other remote filesystem support.

If there's no plan for that or if its limited to usual suspects like GDrive, Dropbox etc., then I guess there's not much benefit to selfhosting.

That's all far-future stuff that will let us continue to grow towards our larger ambitions further down the roadmap with a revenue stream that isn't purely dependent upon donations, which isn't sustainable on its own. It will always be a purely separate value-add that's not shoved down the throat of users— a subset of users will find that helpful and pay for the storage and most users won't care and won't be bothered about it. But we don't have any of that yet, and won't for a while.

Really looking forward to having something with decent vector AND raster capabilites. That niche is currently unfilled unless one wants to run an old version of Fireworks in a VM...

I keep reading occasional people talk about Fireworks with a wistful bygone "what could have been" for raster + vector. That's older than my era (although I was old enough to grow up making Flash animations and games) so I never got to know Fireworks, but I do hope to finally build a worthy solution after all this time. The neat part is that, in Graphite, raster content (brushes, patterns, noise, filters, effects, Mandelbrot Set fractals, etc.) is procedurally generated on-the-fly at the current viewing resolution, just like vector content. So they both interact harmoniously in a way no other editor has been able to manage.

I'm glad at least one person in this thread mentioned Fireworks. I found it much more intuitive than Gimp and Inkscape.