Hi, I’ve been using Zookeeper for about a week, and am impressed with how capable it seems to be so far. I had a viable customised arcade cabinet within an hour or so, and my cad experience is Tinkercad …
Some improvement points:
- You need to give way more options in preferences! As an example, I support you having a default set of sane values for things like the refresh rate pre-configured, but a user should be able to fine-tune those themselves, including (in my case) switching off auto-refresh completely. Give more advanced users the capabilities to optimise their workflow, folks.
- Visible labels in parts: The moment we move to a verbal, natural language interface, we need a way to quickly reference “things”. It does create a reference if we ask, but it’s not visible, so users find themselves saying "move the H part up. No, the other H! Wait it’s G… I think ". Having a clear label/balloon visible would help, driven by a “label visibility toggle” button, preferably.
- I can have multiple kcl rendering at the same time, but switching is awkward. The selection box at the top left infers that we should be able to switch viewing different files, but it just opens the menu. Either have each in a separate tab, or list the various open files in that menu so that we can quickly, intuitively, switch between views.
- This is more for the app itself than zookeeper: you need a technical drawing tool. It’s really cool to build our project, but then we can’t output a plan to build the thing, we have to export step files and … learn how to use a tech drawing tool in another package.
- Finally, my biggest frustration with it so far is what I see others complaining: speed, or the lack of it. Zookeeper itself, is understandable why it takes time, and I’m frankly ok with that part of it.
But the cad tool itself is slow as molasses. Rendering, navigating objects, even opening dialogs is way slower than it should be, and it splutters and jitters and slows down a lot. The view refresh is hilariously slow, easily taking 20 seconds to a full minute to redraw a not that complicated design (arcade cabinet). For a community-driven, donation-supported project, this would have been perfectly acceptable, but for a subscription-driven commercial offering, it’s edging into the “difficult to swallow”.