Is Fritzing dead? No updates since June 2016.
Today it is the 16th of October 2018.
But it is free, so I can’t ask for my money back…
It is certainly dying, although you can help out if you are willing to invest time. Some of the original developers are working on a javascript version of Fritzing and I’m slowly making progress on the doing some bug fixes on the current version. At present that involves changing some of the parts that use tspan in core as that currently breaks Qt (I think it is a bug in Qt, but fixing the parts is easier than trying to fix Qt. At present I can’t even build the current release on the version of Qt (5.6) that was used as it hits the same error. That is currently blocking doing anything about the fact that libgit2 is too old and is breaking parts update on Windows (at least Win7, possibly not Win10).
Peter
Hi Peter,
I wish I could help. I actually would have loved to help. If my connection to my subconsious was stronger. Doing so much work in the conscious mind makes us overloaded if not having an huge passion that flows energy from the subconscious. Just a little warm-up…
Now you caught me on another issue. Qt!
I have read a lot about Qt, it looks great, so does the license…for Qt. So when you mentioned Qt, I was wondering, is someone paying the monthly USD400 something for licensing. I guess not, and the open source version is used. Is that so, if I may ask?
Reason asking is because I have tried, not really tried, not even got started on a B4A licence for Android, and the development software is evolving faster than their documentation, so it seems hard to begin with.
Have you heard of B4A, or B4X?
I mean, if using Qt to develop Fritzing on a open source licence, is that why it stopped…? The open source version hit the wall of the free version of Qt?
I hope I am not confusing the matter too much now. Qt compiles to Desktops, mobiles etc.
B4A, B4X was originally starting as mobile development.
I really curious about the Qt concept once have started and has come as far as Fritzing have, is one forced eventually to enter the licensing concept at a ridiculous price, to be able to continue developing?
Hex
I think the reason it is dead is because the creator no longer had time for it and gave up control to a non-profit that ironically wants more money before they will do any more work. The site has a copyright notice of 2010 and the writing implies it hasn’t been updated since then.
http://friends.fritzing.org/
You can see they have a goal of 40k euro to get Fritzing to a first release and they are only at 6k. I think this money is supposed to be generated through donations and profits from getting boards made through Aisler. But unfortunately they charge way to much at 44x the price I currently pay and no choice in thickness or color so they do not get enough business.
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Yes Fritzing is using the open source version of Qt (so no monthly fees). Qt isn’t directly the problem, there are currently issues (which may be Fritzing’s) with tspans but they are fixable with time. Most of the problem (at least for me) is there is no one with experience in the code base that communicates any more. That means you are reading the source to figure out how things work. It has taken most of a year for me to get a working Windows development environment together because libgit2 didn’t want to compile correctly (it doesn’t help that I normally don’t do development on Windows either). I intend on publishing how to do this to try and encourage more support, but haven’t gotten around to it yet. At this point as I said I think the way forward i(if there is one) s likely the javascript version that is being developed. I know nothing about javascript and thus can’t help much in that. I can probably help in cleaning up the parts database which is one thing they need (and which is of use to both the current project and the new one). As I said I also hope to get far enough to be able to fix some of the bugs in the current version (I have some already but as noted have only recently got a build environment on Windows working) even if that means you have to build from source to get the fixes.
Peter
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