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ArtCraft Apps – open-source Adobe compatible suite written in Rust

42 points aghuang 3 hours ago 37 comments

echelon 1 hour ago | parent

Haha, I wasn't ready to post this to HN. It's not anywhere close to ready. But thank you aghuang. (I want to post this again when we clear Beta phase.)

These are still super early alpha. All MIT/Apache licensed. No telemetry.

I'm going to try to drive these to 100% parity but it's going to take a minute. And I'll need lots of help. (Anyone want to join me? I'll pay stipends and bug bounties.)

I'm going to do Microsoft Office, AutoCAD, and Solidworks too. Probably a lot of stuff to collapse.

It's not just SaaSocalypse. Everything can be open source multiplatform Rust now.

Party like it's 1999 and the Internet / tech scene belongs to us again. We can literally deenshittify the world without breaking a sweat.

nayuki 55 minutes ago | parent

This project looks extremely ambitious. Are these applications coded by AI by any chance? I can't find any easy documentation about the development process.

slopinthebag 33 minutes ago | parent

are you kidding? its all vibe coding

praet 20 minutes ago | parent

They are clearly all vibe-coded

4b11b4 54 minutes ago | parent

I like this mindset but damn that's a lot of tokens? At what cost? And then to continue to maintain and .. idk.. I suppose it'll work? If the motivation is strong enough and momentum is sustained?

echelon 50 minutes ago | parent

Only have to pay the price once.

I'm sick of Gimp, Krita, and Inkscape being the best Linux and open source have to offer.

dofm 40 minutes ago | parent

I m not really a fan of GIMP but Krita and Inkscape are both serious and competent apps with their own principles and features, made by people who care and who seriously understand their knowledge domains, and I would rather have either than AI-slop clones of Adobe apps that enshrine Adobe’s dated workflows in open source that no human wrote.

I think you can do this project of yours without being dismissive of the work (and the merits of the work) done by real people over years.

Be careful of what you might damage by doing this.

amlib 2 minutes ago | parent

>I think you can do this project of yours without being dismissive of the work (and the merits of the work) done by real people over years.

Specially when the LLMs he is using to make this software were 100% trained and likely heavily influenced by the software he is shitting on.

fschuett 43 minutes ago | parent

Just wanted to say at least for the non-creative apps I am already doing that at https://azul.rs

But its a lot harder if you want to maintain at least some level of quality. For example, your PDF export exports texts as paths and correct PDF encoding and font subsetting took months of trial and error (I maintain the printpdf crate).

So you have to actually use your apps, test extensively, etc. - don‘t underestimate the effort required for QA and testing.

diffstrokes 41 minutes ago | parent

Amazing work!

qchris 38 minutes ago | parent

I'd love to see something like this for Solidworks, but think you're in for a boatload of trouble there. OpenCASCADE is less capable than Parasolid, and a true Rust-based parametric geometry kernel capable of boolean joins, fillets, etc. needed for anything resembling a modern feature set is wickedly difficult (that's one of the reasons why everyone licenses existing ones and don't try to roll their own).

Don't let that discourage you, though! A fast, local, fully-featured 3D parametric CAD program that takes advantage of modern hardware parallelism that can be extended/scripted is just basically one of the holy grails of software and even exploratory efforts might uncover some great paths forward to making that a reality!

dofm 23 minutes ago | parent

Indeed. If you are going to burn tokens to clone something, then assembling a team of people who could help you burn those tokens in service of a bRep kernel (let alone a Parasolid kernel) would be an interesting undertaking.

With photoshop, illustrator, etc., there’s a fair amount of code out there. No LLM has however ever seen the source code —- or I suspect even much detailed discussion —- of a bRep kernel better than Opencascade, but with the right people to decide what maths to work on, maybe there is progress to be made. This knowledge is held by few people, many of whom will now have retired!

brookst 22 minutes ago | parent

It’s not what you’re after but onshape is pretty respectable, and the free offering is decent.

qchris 5 minutes ago | parent

I've played around with most of the solutions in this space (OnShape, Fusion360, FreeCAD, Solvespace), but honestly at this point would probably just end up paying for the Solidworks hobbyist license; it's like $4/month and I have a Windows desktop available. That said, there's been some consensus built over the past few years about what the next-gen CAD software should probably look like, ranging from modern scripting capabilities to version control and intermediate shape representations.

A big of the attraction of re-building this kind of foundational software isn't the base capability (commercial 3D CAD has barely even seen incremental improvements for more than a decade, in large part because it's just pretty well solved in the existing programs), but that a modern kernel would be a major step forward for unblocking implementation of some of those other capabilities.

rancar2 27 minutes ago | parent

The videos of the features are very well done, and it looks like there is a unified vision, which is not what any of the other products have. Did Google copy some of the UI/UX? I was curious where their inspirations were, and I think this may have been it.

I look forward to the beta and beyond!

cjonas 23 minutes ago | parent

Despite whatever else happens with AI, I am excited about the near future where we have an open source version of basically every app. I hope this is the beginning of the end of the subscription model. Keep it up!

timschmidt 8 minutes ago | parent

> AutoCAD, and Solidworks too

You may want those in new high-performance infinite precision: https://github.com/timschmidt/hyperreal

Exact curves: https://github.com/timschmidt/hypercurve

Meshes: https://github.com/timschmidt/hypermesh

and more in the ~22 crate stack.

girouetten21 1 hour ago | parent

OMG, the page design is incredible

someothherguyy 41 minutes ago | parent

sarcasm?

nickc888 45 minutes ago | parent

i don't want to have to sign up / log in just to test drive the desktop app?

somacore 35 minutes ago | parent

you don't have to?

https://github.com/storytold

CreepGin 44 minutes ago | parent

Just curious, what is the subscription for? Purely for image generations? Are these built into the apps, or just a web feature?

echelon 27 minutes ago | parent

That's a web feature / separate open source app. It's open source HiggsField (app, backend infra).

The Adobe apps are 100% open source, desktop, MIT, no telemetry.

https://github.com/storytold/photocraft etc.

_stillmind 42 minutes ago | parent

I'll just keep using Affinity.

lukeify 36 minutes ago | parent

…which was bought by Canva and has already been enshittified.

Gigachad 24 minutes ago | parent

It really hasn't been enshittified. They made everything that already existed in Affinity free without any catches. And then added some new AI powered editing tools which require a subscription. Tools which you don't need and can ignore easily.

slopinthebag 33 minutes ago | parent

i like this project, the scope is enough to test most of the claims being made about vibe coding

Gigachad 22 minutes ago | parent

I'm interested to keep an eye on this. Doesn't seem like it's in a usable state right now but if it ends up workable this will really shake up the entire software industry.

doc_ick 3 minutes ago | parent

I don’t think an initial usable program will shake things up. I think a persistent path for upgrade and continued support would. As much as users could trust open source, personally I’d need more consistency and reliance.

colesantiago 31 minutes ago | parent

As soon as I saw this software suite about 2 days ago, I shorted Adobe Inc immediately.

Adobe to $120 price target at least, could be even lower.

brookst 24 minutes ago | parent

Same for Microsoft and others. There is still a business in selling and supporting software, but not in creating it, and barriers to entry are now purely about sales and service.

somacore 17 minutes ago | parent

These companies are going to start tagging files not made by their software as not being "genuine" and freak out a bunch of IT people, who will then ban these apps.

Svoka 17 minutes ago | parent

Are we looking at the same stock? I am confused where this data is coming from. What I see is stock slightly higher than it was week ago, fell compared to day ago, and the change is 1-2%, way less than you 50% fall claim.

praet 21 minutes ago | parent

Adobe's moat is so small, so it's a matter of time until someone frustrated with their pricing would rather just rebuild the entire Creative Suite. I have also rebuilt the features from Photoshop I want using Rust recently (primarily because the company I work for started blocking Photopea, but I digress...) and it's been a great to work with. I can imagine the same would hold true for Lightroom, Illustrator, and Indesign.

Overall, looks like a cool project. Looking forward to the *Craft repos on github gaining traction

nonethewiser 9 minutes ago | parent

Pretty crazy. I think we’re already very numb to AI. Can you imagine seeing something like this pop up 3 years ago? Youd have been dumbfounded and it would have been major news.

Gigachad 3 minutes ago | parent

I think there's some fatigue with all the brand new projects that have a skeleton of a project up that isn't really usable yet, where the original prompter doesn't bother to finish it off when it gets too hard.

I think this project is interesting, but it's more a wait and see what happens kind of thing.