Hew v1.0.0

Hew v1.0 - The "Rock Solid" Release

It's 1.0. Hew is a real, use-it-every-day 3D modeler now — and it's free, open source, and runs everywhere: macOS, Windows, Linux, and any modern browser with no account and no reduced "web tier."

If you learned to model in SketchUp, you already know how to use Hew. Draw on a face, push/pull it into shape, inference-snap everything, mostly the same keyboard shortcuts — your muscle memory just works. The difference is underneath: every push/pull is a discrete, watertight solid, so nothing welds to a neighbor because you forgot to group it, nothing goes hollow because a face or the wrong line got deleted, and Union/Subtract/Intersect only run when you say so. It's "Select All → Make Group" as the data model instead of a necessary habit.

What you actually get

Here's the short version of what's in the box:

• The SketchUp moves — lines, rectangles, circles, arcs, polygons; push/pull; Follow Me for moldings, spheres, and goblets; Offset, Slice, Move/Rotate/Scale with copy arrays.
• Solids that stay solid — watertight objects, real booleans, curves that stay true circles under their facets.
• Precision — type exact sizes mid-gesture, tape measure and protractor, dimensions and leader text, real 3D text, measure-and-rescale.
• Organization — nested groups, components that edit once and update everywhere, tags with per-tag visibility, saved Scenes, an Outliner on every platform (including the free web app), and the Library above.
• Paper and the shop — print at an exact drawing scale on any platform, tile a 1:1 template across pages with trim marks, export true-vector SVG and PDF, a cut-list page, and Shop Mode that puts the model on any phone via a QR code — with View in AR on iPhone and iPad.
• Files that are yours — an open, documented .hew format; imports SketchUp 2017 .skp, glTF, COLLADA, and STL; exports glTF, STL, 3MF, USDZ, and SVG.
• Scriptable — a full API and an MCP server, so you can drive Hew from the command line or hand the keys to an AI agent.

Why 1.0, why now

Hew started because the venerable SketchUp Make 2017 isn't going to work the next time I update my OS and the free SketchUp web app doesn't support the Outliner (hard requirement for me)... and I wasn't willing to give up on just-shy of 20 years of SketchUp muscle memory. So I built the tool I wanted: the good parts of SketchUp, improved where they could be, given away free and open, and running everywhere — with no account, no subscription, and no reduced tier waiting to upsell you.

That tool is here. It's 1.0. Go make something.

For those following along, what finally tipped the releases into 1.0 territory? Read on:

The Library, now in your browser

The personal Library — your own components, materials, and whole models, each an ordinary .hew file — used to be a desktop-only feature. Not anymore. Open https://app.hew3d.com, save a chair, and it's there next time. It lives in the browser's own storage, so there's nothing to set up.

And if you're on Chrome, Edge, or Brave, you can do one better: point the Library at a real folder on disk. Now it's the same plain .hew files the desktop app uses — put that folder in Dropbox, NextCloud, or iCloud Drive and your Library follows you between machines, with no Hew account and no Hew server in the middle. Bring your own cloud. The web app really is the full modeler now, Library and all.

Menus that finally make sense

The menus grew feature by feature and it showed. So they got a proper pass: one clean, HIG-shaped layout that's identical on every platform. Object commands (Group, Make Component, the booleans) live in their own Object menu instead of cluttering Edit. Panels moved to View, where showing and hiding things belongs. Draw and Tools are grouped by what you're actually doing. The old "Axes" tool is now "Drawing Axes" so it stops colliding with the View ▸ Axes toggle, and Help ▸ Search finds any command by name. It's all small stuff, but it's the kind of small stuff you work with every day, so it needed to be better.

Solid as Gibraltar

A 1.0 has to be dependable, so before shipping it I went looking for trouble — an exhaustive security and correctness audit across the whole stack: the kernel, the importers, the self-hostable relay, the desktop shell, and the browser build. The bugs it turned up are fixed and pinned with tests: a malformed model can't overflow the importer or slip a bad number past the kernel, two browser tabs can't stomp on each other's crash-recovery snapshot, booleans on imported geometry stop refusing themselves, and a group that holds a component instance now moves the whole thing. It's all stuff you'll never see — which is exactly the point.

What's Next?

The 1.0 release is the "everybody can use it" release, but that doesn't mean it's done. See docs/ROADMAP.md for what's coming next. And if you have any specific requests, let me know!

Downloads

The download page picks the right build
for your system, or grab a file directly:

Platform	x64 / Intel	ARM64 / Apple Silicon
macOS — disk image	universal .dmg	universal .dmg
Windows — installer	.exe	.exe
Linux — AppImage	.AppImage	.AppImage
Linux — Debian/Ubuntu	.deb	.deb
Linux — Fedora/openSUSE	.rpm	.rpm
Web — self-hosting tarball	.tar.gz	.tar.gz
Relay — self-hosted Open on Phone (Linux)	.tar.gz	.tar.gz

• The macOS disk image is signed and notarized; one universal app
  covers Apple Silicon and Intel.
• Windows installers are not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen may
  warn on first run — choose More info, then Run anyway.
• On Linux, mark the AppImage executable (chmod +x) before
  first run, or install the .deb/.rpm.
• Desktop builds update themselves; latest.json and the
  .sig assets serve that built-in updater and are not meant
  for manual download.
• Or skip installing entirely: Hew runs in the browser at
  app.hew3d.com.
• Self-hosting the web app, and the optional relay that makes
  Open on Phone work against your own server, is documented in
  docs/SELF_HOSTING.md.

Hew v0.10.0

Hew v0.10.0 - The "Put It On Paper" Release

Hew can finally print! Not 3D print but print print, on actual paper or into a PDF (if you're into that). Think: scaled floor plans or multi-page templates

Standard and Scaled

The "Standard" mode is a "normal" printing layout - whatever you see, it prints and it'll show you want will be printed. Simple.

"Scaled" is where the fun is. You can pick a drawing scale - 1:10, 1:1, 1" = 1' or whatever, and you'll get a printed output that's actually that. There are a lot of options for you to play around with. The "Marks" and "Overlap for gluing" options are particularly slick - this is when you want a 1:1 template that spans multiple pages and you intend to glue it to a board as a where-to-cut guide. Those marks make the alignment on the board trivial.

This is the Print that SketchUp Make never had!

Line art, for real

Hew doesn't yet have "Styles" but there are two pseudo-styles when printing - "As shown" (full color) and "Line art" (white faces, black edges). In Scaled mode, the Line art is made of true vectors, so it's super crisp and handles hidden lines and the like.

Save PDF… vs Print…

Hew just does Print Layout, technically, because it'd be silly to implement the actual printing mechanism. The operating system's own print dialog takes care of that - macOS's support is great; Linux support is surprisingly good; and Windows support is equally surprisingly bad. But if you print at "100% / Actual Size", then the scale will be accurate no matter where you are running Hew.

Hew handles the PDF writing itself, so vectors remain vectors and you get the same result anywhere Hew runs. You can use the OS's PDF output, too, but all bets are off.

What's the vector, victor!

It turns out that since very good printing required vectors, we end up getting SVG support as a side-effect. This was post-1.0 originally but now just try it in File -> Export and pass it on to your laser cutter or CNC.

And more!

• Scene support - you can print each view of a Scene, making this essentially a "drawing set"
• A Cut list page appends a table of every part with its quantity and L × W × H
• Shop Mode gets its own Print Layout sheet, too. Not sure how useful that is but it's there if you need it
• And we can't forget our helpful AI agents - they can print and generate PDFs, too

Also

A security bump for the h2 crate (RUSTSEC-2026-0258) and the usual pile of small fixes along the way

Downloads

The download page picks the right build
for your system, or grab a file directly:

Platform	x64 / Intel	ARM64 / Apple Silicon
macOS — disk image	universal .dmg	universal .dmg
Windows — installer	.exe	.exe
Linux — AppImage	.AppImage	.AppImage
Linux — Debian/Ubuntu	.deb	.deb
Linux — Fedora/openSUSE	.rpm	.rpm
Web — self-hosting tarball	.tar.gz	.tar.gz
Relay — self-hosted Open on Phone (Linux)	.tar.gz	.tar.gz

• The macOS disk image is signed and notarized; one universal app
  covers Apple Silicon and Intel.
• Windows installers are not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen may
  warn on first run — choose More info, then Run anyway.
• On Linux, mark the AppImage executable (chmod +x) before
  first run, or install the .deb/.rpm.
• Desktop builds update themselves; latest.json and the
  .sig assets serve that built-in updater and are not meant
  for manual download.
• Or skip installing entirely: Hew runs in the browser at
  app.hew3d.com.
• Self-hosting the web app, and the optional relay that makes
  Open on Phone work against your own server, is documented in
  docs/SELF_HOSTING.md.

Hew v0.9.0

Hew 0.9.0 - The "Making the Scene" Release

Scenes as snapshots

Scenes are named snapshots of a specific view of a document — the camera, which objects and tags are hidden, the section plane, and the grid/axes/guides. They are very handy for quickly switching between extremely specific ways of viewing a model. Maybe one view is the full 3D model, but then the next scene is a broken out part list, and maybe the third scene is a section plane showing the internal construction

It's even better for Shop Mode (and the reason why Scenes are pre-1.0) because now you can pre-set all of the model views that you'll need out in the shop and just view them trivially out there. Very very handy.

They're usable from the API, too, so agents and all the rest can also benefit

Self-hosted to the max

Self-hosting now work all the way. The Open on Phone now uses <origin>/relay instead of a dedicated cloud instance (share.hew3d.com) so your local URL will work just fine. This works with a new static Linux binary called hew-relay that runs in the same box you're running the web app.

The Hew desktop now has an advanced setting for pointing Hew to your own local install and so that's where the QR code will point the Shop Mode scanner to. With that, you can have a full "Open on Phone" that's strictly over WiFi and never goes out to the cloud!

This release also ships a much more complete docs/SELF_HOSTING.md describing how everything works. It has a container image for hew-relay plus a much more complete Proxmox LXC installer

Random bits, too

Also, Tags received a minor glow-up - selecting a Tag will select everything it carries; you can rename the Tag in place; and multiple objects can be tagged all at once

Recent models are now reachable by the Shop Mode document menu so re-loading one doesn't require restarting the app

Downloads

The download page picks the right build
for your system, or grab a file directly:

Platform	x64 / Intel	ARM64 / Apple Silicon
macOS — disk image	universal .dmg	universal .dmg
Windows — installer	.exe	.exe
Linux — AppImage	.AppImage	.AppImage
Linux — Debian/Ubuntu	.deb	.deb
Linux — Fedora/openSUSE	.rpm	.rpm
Web — self-hosting tarball	.tar.gz	.tar.gz
Relay — self-hosted Open on Phone (Linux)	.tar.gz	.tar.gz

• The macOS disk image is signed and notarized; one universal app
  covers Apple Silicon and Intel.
• Windows installers are not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen may
  warn on first run — choose More info, then Run anyway.
• On Linux, mark the AppImage executable (chmod +x) before
  first run, or install the .deb/.rpm.
• Desktop builds update themselves; latest.json and the
  .sig assets serve that built-in updater and are not meant
  for manual download.
• Or skip installing entirely: Hew runs in the browser at
  app.hew3d.com.
• Self-hosting the web app, and the optional relay that makes
  Open on Phone work against your own server, is documented in
  docs/SELF_HOSTING.md.

Hew v0.8.0

Hew v0.8.0 - The "Hew on your Phone" Release

Introducing "Shop Mode" - create a model at your desk and use the model on your phone out in the workshop!

Shop Mode — Hew in a workshop

This is a read-only and touch-first viewer laser focused on smaller screens. You can tap a part for its dimensions, browse a live parts sheet (cutlist), measure parts with a Tape Measure (with a mangifier loupe for precision), isolate a part to view it alone, snap to standard camera views and perspectives, even keep recently opened models offline. Super cool!

There are two primary ways to get a model onto your phone:

• Add the .hew file to iCloud Drive or Nextcloud or any other way that syncs to your phone and Hew can read it from the phone's files
• Transfer it from your desktop to your phone over share.hew3d.com

That "cloud transfer" works like this: You open the model in your Hew Desktop app (not web app) and choose "File -> Open on Phone.." This will show QR code that you scan with Hew Shop Mode's in-app camera.. and voila, it loads right up on your phone! The handoff is strictly end-to-end encrypted - the key is in the local-only QR code, so the remote server sees only the encrypted bits (and only for the few seconds between upload and download)

View in AR (iOS)

You can export any model to USDZ and view it in any software or hardware that supports it... one such is any modern iPhone. In that case, just tell Hew Shop Mode to "View in AR..." and you can see your model floating around in the real world with you. It's fun and maybe in some cases can be actually practical.

Self-hosting

This release also has a new self-hosting guide plus a bare Proxmox LXC script for running the Hew web app in your homelab. Definitely for geeks. There's more coming on this front, too.

Downloads

The download page picks the right build
for your system, or grab a file directly:

Platform	x64 / Intel	ARM64 / Apple Silicon
macOS — disk image	universal .dmg	universal .dmg
Windows — installer	.exe	.exe
Linux — AppImage	.AppImage	.AppImage
Linux — Debian/Ubuntu	.deb	.deb
Linux — Fedora/openSUSE	.rpm	.rpm
Web — self-hosting tarball	.tar.gz	.tar.gz

• The macOS disk image is signed and notarized; one universal app
  covers Apple Silicon and Intel.
• Windows installers are not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen may
  warn on first run — choose More info, then Run anyway.
• On Linux, mark the AppImage executable (chmod +x) before
  first run, or install the .deb/.rpm.
• Desktop builds update themselves; latest.json and the
  .sig assets serve that built-in updater and are not meant
  for manual download.
• Or skip installing entirely: Hew runs in the browser at
  app.hew3d.com.

Hew v0.7.2

Hew v0.7.2 - The "Update the code to match the docs" Release

The "Getting Started" tutorial on the website was almost completely rewritten to be easier to follow but in the context of the re-write, it became clear that the "command palette" search key binding was weirdly inconsistent. Going forward, it's Cmd-/ on macOS and Ctrl-/ everywhere else

Downloads

The download page picks the right build
for your system, or grab a file directly:

Platform	x64 / Intel	ARM64 / Apple Silicon
macOS — disk image	universal .dmg	universal .dmg
Windows — installer	.exe	.exe
Linux — AppImage	.AppImage	.AppImage
Linux — Debian/Ubuntu	.deb	.deb
Linux — Fedora/openSUSE	.rpm	.rpm
Web — self-hosting tarball	.tar.gz	.tar.gz

• The macOS disk image is signed and notarized; one universal app
  covers Apple Silicon and Intel.
• Windows installers are not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen may
  warn on first run — choose More info, then Run anyway.
• On Linux, mark the AppImage executable (chmod +x) before
  first run, or install the .deb/.rpm.
• Desktop builds update themselves; latest.json and the
  .sig assets serve that built-in updater and are not meant
  for manual download.
• Or skip installing entirely: Hew runs in the browser at
  app.hew3d.com.

Hew v0.7.1

Hew v0.7.1 - First Bug Fix Release

The massive v0.4.0 release introduced a regression whereby "inference points" (aka, "projection points") were often ignored when using an axis lock. Since those points are doubly important when in an axis-lock mode, that was a big enough bug to warrant a special release to handle it.

This release fixes that regression and now the inference points you'd expect to snap to are snappable to.

Downloads

The download page picks the right build
for your system, or grab a file directly:

Platform	x64 / Intel	ARM64 / Apple Silicon
macOS — disk image	universal .dmg	universal .dmg
Windows — installer	.exe	.exe
Linux — AppImage	.AppImage	.AppImage
Linux — Debian/Ubuntu	.deb	.deb
Linux — Fedora/openSUSE	.rpm	.rpm
Web — self-hosting tarball	.tar.gz	.tar.gz

• The macOS disk image is signed and notarized; one universal app
  covers Apple Silicon and Intel.
• Windows installers are not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen may
  warn on first run — choose More info, then Run anyway.
• On Linux, mark the AppImage executable (chmod +x) before
  first run, or install the .deb/.rpm.
• Desktop builds update themselves; latest.json and the
  .sig assets serve that built-in updater and are not meant
  for manual download.
• Or skip installing entirely: Hew runs in the browser at
  app.hew3d.com.

Hew v0.7.0

Hew v0.7.0 - Shared Library and Nested Components

This release adds a personal shared library, finally lets component definitions nest, and fixes how SketchUp groups import.

Shared Library for Reusable Parts

Some parts - components, materials/textures, and even models - are so useful that you want to use them in multiple models. The Hew Library now gives you a way to save off those parts for later reuse.

These parts live as ordinary .hew files in a regular folder (Settings ▸ Folders or Home/Hew Library) that makes backing up and syncing easy. Once added, you can choose to Insert the part into your current model or you can open up the part on its own for editing. The Hew desktop apps see the Library as a native window while the web build gets an in-app browser.

Nested Component Definitions

This was a big missing feature that is now there. Nearly every complex component will be made up of several parts - often/frequently other components or groups or groups of components. Prior versions of Hew treated those as just groups and good luck editing them. This release now unlocks component's full power and now you can nest to your heart's content and even edit them in-place. And when you're done, remember to add it to the Library since such a masterpiece must be shared with other models!

SketchUp Imports Recognize Groups/Components

The base openskp library already recognized the difference between "groups" and "components" but Hew didn't honor that and, as a result, SketchUp groups (even nested groups) showed up as plain objects and components were essentially componentized plain objects. No more! Now on a SketchUp 2017 import, a simple non-nested group will become a Hew Object, but a nested group will be a Hew Group, and any kind of component will be a Hew Component.

Toolchain Updates

This release also tightens up the toolchain a bit. Every important dep in the project build is now pinned to an exact version and Renovate performs daily audits to ensure that everything stays up to date and on top of security fixes and bug fixes.

Downloads

The download page picks the right build
for your system, or grab a file directly:

Platform	x64 / Intel	ARM64 / Apple Silicon
macOS — disk image	universal .dmg	universal .dmg
Windows — installer	.exe	.exe
Linux — AppImage	.AppImage	.AppImage
Linux — Debian/Ubuntu	.deb	.deb
Linux — Fedora/openSUSE	.rpm	.rpm
Web — self-hosting tarball	.tar.gz	.tar.gz

• The macOS disk image is signed and notarized; one universal app
  covers Apple Silicon and Intel.
• Windows installers are not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen may
  warn on first run — choose More info, then Run anyway.
• On Linux, mark the AppImage executable (chmod +x) before
  first run, or install the .deb/.rpm.
• Desktop builds update themselves; latest.json and the
  .sig assets serve that built-in updater and are not meant
  for manual download.
• Or skip installing entirely: Hew runs in the browser at
  app.hew3d.com.

Hew v0.6.0

Hew v0.6.0 - Public API and MCP

Hew now has an API and MCP included in a new hew-cli command line client. The hew-cli can build and edit Hew models from a script, a shell, via an AI agent and - with the default "headless" mode - all with no UI required. If you do want to watch as it builds a model, there is also --live mode which will write to your already open Hew desktop instance.

This is cross-platform as always. Avoid the Linux AppImage if you want to use the API or MCP, though, as it's a bit of a pain to "extract" the hew-cli - use the .dep/.rpm packages to get both the desktop and the CLI easily.

Getting started with hew-cli and MCP: docs/API_GUIDE.md. Full protocol: docs/HEW_API.md

Downloads

The download page picks the right build
for your system, or grab a file directly:

Platform	x64 / Intel	ARM64 / Apple Silicon
macOS — disk image	universal .dmg	universal .dmg
Windows — installer	.exe	.exe
Linux — AppImage	.AppImage	.AppImage
Linux — Debian/Ubuntu	.deb	.deb
Linux — Fedora/openSUSE	.rpm	.rpm
Web — self-hosting tarball	.tar.gz	.tar.gz

• The macOS disk image is signed and notarized; one universal app
  covers Apple Silicon and Intel.
• Windows installers are not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen may
  warn on first run — choose More info, then Run anyway.
• On Linux, mark the AppImage executable (chmod +x) before
  first run, or install the .deb/.rpm.
• Desktop builds update themselves; latest.json and the
  .sig assets serve that built-in updater and are not meant
  for manual download.
• Or skip installing entirely: Hew runs in the browser at
  app.hew3d.com.

Hew v0.5.0

Hew 0.5.0

This is the "full support for component and group editing plus tape measure parity with SketchUp" release

Components and Groups used to each add tool editing support ad-hoc but that meant that some tools wouldn't work and some worked differently than with plain objects. No more!

Full Component and Group Editing

Both Component and Groups now become "plain objects" or "normal geometry" during editing and so all of the tools work with them just as they do with anything else - no more special cases.

Components are essentially special versions of Groups, but where a Group's copy will create a unique copy, a Component's copy will create another instance of itself

Tape Measure Parity

The Tape Measure now works on any plane and support axis locking - very much modeled after how SketchUp handles the same. A small change in scope, but huge for those of us who use the SketchUp Tape Measure more than any other tool!

Tape Measure resize/scale now works to resize Groups or Components without resizing the entire model. You can still resize/scale the entire model with Tape Measure by doing the type measurement change outside of a Group/Component editing session.

Downloads

The download page picks the right build
for your system, or grab a file directly:

Platform	x64 / Intel	ARM64 / Apple Silicon
macOS — disk image	universal .dmg	universal .dmg
Windows — installer	.exe	.exe
Linux — AppImage	.AppImage	.AppImage
Linux — Debian/Ubuntu	.deb	.deb
Linux — Fedora/openSUSE	.rpm	.rpm
Web — self-hosting tarball	.tar.gz	.tar.gz

• The macOS disk image is signed and notarized; one universal app
  covers Apple Silicon and Intel.
• Windows installers are not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen may
  warn on first run — choose More info, then Run anyway.
• On Linux, mark the AppImage executable (chmod +x) before
  first run, or install the .deb/.rpm.
• Desktop builds update themselves; latest.json and the
  .sig assets serve that built-in updater and are not meant
  for manual download.
• Or skip installing entirely: Hew runs in the browser at
  app.hew3d.com.

Hew v0.4.0

Hew v0.4.0

A large release: 3D text, dimensions, a full camera system, texture
positioning, and modeling parity inside component definitions. One step
closer to SketchUp parity.

3D Text (for 3D printers)

• Place extruded solid text on any face or plane
• Five OFL-licensed fonts bundled (Onest, Lora, Varela Round, Space Mono,
  Alfa Slab One), plus your available system fonts

Dimensions and annotations

• Linear dimensions, radial dimensions, and free-form leader
  text / annotations.
• Annotations save with the document and stay legible at any zoom.

Camera

• Parallel Projection — the orthographic view
• Typed Field of View, and Zoom Window to frame a dragged rectangle.
• Position Camera, Look Around, and Walk for first-person
  placement and walkthrough navigation.

Modeling and tools

• Rotational arrays: Copy arrays work for circles like for rectangles
• Push/Pull: double-click a face to repeat the last distance and a
  Ctrl/Cmd toggle extrudes a new unique solid
• Model rescale: measure between two points with Tape Measure then type a
  new length to rescale the model
• Movable drawing axes: place and orient the origin to somewhere else on
  the model
• Axis locks now work mid-gesture — press an arrow key to set the axis
  plane lock at any timme up until the second click for a shape

Materials and painting

• Alt-click samples a face's material into the current swatch;
  Shift-click replaces that material everywhere in the document, or
  within the clicked object with Ctrl/Cmd
• Position Texture: drag a texture's corner pins on a face to move,
  rotate, scale, and shear it, or type an exact angle or scale factor.
• Searchable material palette, with the add-color and add-texture panels
  collapsed until needed.

Components

• Near full modeling-tool parity inside a component definition: sketching,
  extrusion, Follow Me, booleans, slice, and transforms all work through
  any instance and apply to all instances

Random

• The snap label now says "projected" when a snapped point is used
  as an alignment reference rather than the actual point

Fixes

• Double-click was broken on Chromium-based targets

File format

New format for new fields, so documents saved by 0.4.0 will not open in 0.3.0.

Downloads

The download page picks the right build
for your system, or grab a file directly:

Platform	x64 / Intel	ARM64 / Apple Silicon
macOS — disk image	universal .dmg	universal .dmg
Windows — installer	.exe	.exe
Linux — AppImage	.AppImage	.AppImage
Linux — Debian/Ubuntu	.deb	.deb
Linux — Fedora/openSUSE	.rpm	.rpm
Web — self-hosting tarball	.tar.gz	.tar.gz

• The macOS disk image is signed and notarized; one universal app
  covers Apple Silicon and Intel.
• Windows installers are not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen may
  warn on first run — choose More info, then Run anyway.
• On Linux, mark the AppImage executable (chmod +x) before
  first run, or install the .deb/.rpm.
• Desktop builds update themselves; latest.json and the
  .sig assets serve that built-in updater and are not meant
  for manual download.
• Or skip installing entirely: Hew runs in the browser at
  app.hew3d.com.