Most of FreeCAD's icons were reworked to better comply with Tango guidelines.

stpZ (a compressed STEP format) is now supported.

STEP import leverages the new Part container and uses it to organize an imported STEP assembly into sub-assemblies, now more closely following the original document's structure.

The dependency graph benefited from graphical enhancements.

A new Navigation Indicator at the bottom right of the FreeCAD window allows quick access to the navigation styles.

Document recomputes can now be disabled/enabled via the context menu.

Yorik van Havre wrote ' The FreeCAD Manual' as an introductory book on how to use FreeCAD.

The new TechDraw workbench aims to replace the Drawing workbench, and already provides more features than the old Drawing workbench. New tools to create datum (reference) geometry such as points, axes and planes make PartDesign a lot more versatile. A new Body container now holds a chain of features and lifts the requirement of mapping sketches to planar faces. The PartDesign workbench has been completely overhauled.

New additional modules were also developed by the community.

For comparison, this is more than three times the work done between v0.16 and 0.15! Most existing workbenches benefited from improvements, and two completely new workbenches were added. More than 6,800 revisions were added to FreeCAD's source code. It's been 2 years since the previous 0.16 release, but the FreeCAD team didn't stay idle during that time.

Freecad 017