How big are the deal sizes? Who are you selling to? How many of them are there in the market? Are the lead, the user, the buyer, and the decision maker the same?
Start by going to whoever you think your customer is and asking them how they go about making purchasing decisions. Ask specifics... what was the last thing you purchased?
I would encourage looking into Rhino3D and Grasshopper3D. As @jpgleeson mentions - this is already widely used by architects as they move from a world of buildings made up of mass-produced identical components (e.g., every brick is the same shape and size), to a world where mass customization is possible (e.g., every brick has variable shape, massing, structural properties, etc.). Being able to prescribe that programmatically has a lot of promise. Tools like Grasshopper already enable some of this customization via code as you can see here https://developer.rhino3d.com/guides/rhinopython/ghpython-ca...
Plugging into existing frameworks (like Rhino) is quite easy and can open the door to other realms of optimization/simulation for the designs you are scripting. For instance you could leverage generative design (e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HLRtXSG7fQ) and other software that can be used to evaluate designs according against variety of criteria ranging from structural integrity, to environmental performance, to 3d-printability, etc. If there’s open source frameworks you can plug into, even better.. and if not.. then maybe that’s what’s missing: an easy standard way for various opensource projects to share and edit information.
Programmatically-defined designs make sense to me only if you can easily change parameters to quickly produce, evaluate, and optimize the designs/variations/results. Otherwise - Better to use a GUI that allows for more direct (and less abstracted) expression of designer intent
Similarly open source CAD makes sense if it can be augmented by other open source projects - including sharing and editing data from these various projects
Hi Everyone - writing to introduce YipYip! to you all.
It is an open source framework for selecting links on the web without the use of a mouse. We've optimized it for Gmail and a few other sites, but ideally the community (aka you!) adapts it to work on whichever websites you need. (Firefox extension coming soon)
It's pretty simple to use:
1⃣ YipYip is an always-on search & keyboard navigation assistant that turns Gmail (and any other website) into a keyboard-first product.
2⃣ Just type to search.
3⃣ YipYip highlights any buttons or links in the page matching your search.
4⃣ Press Tab to jump through the matches.
5⃣ Press Enter to select the current match.
Voila!
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YipYip! can be optimized to perform better on any given website and it is open source. Feel free to check out the GitHub: https://github.com/comake/yip-yip/
Inspired by Avatar the Last Airbender. Just like Avatar Aang uses Appa to fly through the his world, you can use YipYip to fly through the web: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiqBt372ESk