well duh, that’s why she wears glasses while hammering! :pppppp
 

It always bored me seeing the tools and other things that need hands for in this cartoon. I’m glad I’m not the only one that it bothers. Neat design.

@when she felt her wings unfold  
I’ve just assumed from the beginning that their frogs had evolved into thumblike appendages that can be used to grip objects between the frog and the inner edge of the hoof. And, yeah, also that these are cartoony representations of Equestrians the same way the Humans in other cartoons are cartoony representations.

(Plus you get visual gags for teens and adults and any kids paying attention like the foam thingy at the spa for hoof-painting)
 
If you want a good story told at the intersection of mediated/simplified experience for the masses, cool aliens, and societal/mental uplift and meddling (taken somewhere genuinely horrifying), I strongly recommend A Deepness In The Sky by Vernor Vinge. I’ve probably banged on about this before though.
 
For me the funs start when you begin thinking about the biological essentials needed for a functioning Pretty Horse World™. What are our favourite little ponies like really? Intelligence and big brains sure. So their eyes, while large, cannot be that size for reals. What about dexterity in the absence of, well, anything manual? Well, they need fine motor control for functional tool use. Our world’s horses… well, they flail. Big and clumsy legs, but powerful and super-fast for running - except around the mouth and face because they’re really pretty picky plant eaters who need to be very discriminating to avoid getting poisoned, a potentially fatal condition given their lack of a gag/vomit reflex. (Which itself is interesting - some people say horses don’t vom purely to allow faster running, what with all the jostling of stomach contents.)
 
For the little pink unmagical ponies though, I guess they’d need a level of forehoof-dexterity too. An un-fused radius and ulna, and a degree of twist allowed for the cannon bone (the back-bones under our own palm). A division of neural signalling that allows fine motor control. Put those in combination with an already-capable mouth and you have a two-hoof, one-mouth grasp that’s pretty capable. Try it: thumbs in, pick up pencil, grasp against face and lips. Freaky, but… maybe! The trick would be sitting down to free up the fore-end.
 
(Turns out pony civilisation must be super-dependent upon the ability to sit comfortably, and low writing/working desks with elbow/chest rests. There is an actual path here that needs cushions while discovering the secret of banging-the-rocks-together.)
 
Somebody else can explain straight-up magic, and how it works with unicorn horns and pegasususus wings. I haven’t a clue there! ☺

@TexasUberAlles  
It always feels awesome to think that every story written has it’s own theoretical universe where it technically can take place.  
Until you realize that it includes… shudder … Dr. Seuss Erotica.

@That One Guy  
I love fan content that takes this concept and runs with it; I’ve always been a fan of the concept that these universes exist as real worlds out there somewhere in the multiverse, and the stories we see of them are interpretations of real places made to fit a given format and audience here. It makes fictional worlds much more interesting and, well, realistic.

@Background Pony #FFD1  
That’s exactly the reasoning the show uses, I’d imagine. Technically directed at children, they’d have a harder time recognizing something like what’s above as a hammer than they would recognize a ‘human’ hammer.  
Still, for fan-fiction purposes, this is a fairly interesting idea.

@TexasUberAlles  
Been troperrific won’t help. I was kinda sarcastic on my statement. I think it’s much more simple, as people will easily recognice a human hammer than this kind of hammer if they see it for the first time without context. Pony society would be much more different and alien if they use their own technology. For that we have science fiction, this is not.

@Background Pony #FFD1  
a more intelligent and dexterous species  
Well, if Humans were that much more intelligent… where are they now? In TVTropes terms, for this scenario I think Ponies are more likely to be Uplifted Animals in Humanity’s Wake; for whatever reason, the upright apes are gone, but one of the species they previously domesticated leveled up to sapience and learned how to use magic, and some kind of racial memory still persists from the time when the only technology they had at hoof was that left behind by the Precursors. They’ve done plenty of inventing on their own, of course, but they keep on using certain things without even realizing that there might be better ways to accomplish the tasks those things are meant to accomplish, just because it’s always been done that way.

@TexasUberAlles  
So, you are basically saying that ponies are this? tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LowCultureHighTech  
They only reuse what a more intelligent and dexterous species were using before?

It’s always disappointed me that there hasn’t been much of this sort of thing, since there are any number of ways that the designs of most of their technology could be improved by optimizing it for, y’know, horses to use. I reckon it’s one of two things at play, though: the most Occam-approved explanation is that the show isn’t an accurate portrayal of life in Equestria as it actually happens, but a cartoon that translates all of that into a form which is immediately recognizable to the audience, and that includes not only speaking the local language but also using tools and accessories that are familiar to the audience without having to slow the narrative down to explain them; the other explanation is that from an in-universe perspective, at some point in the distant Pre-Equestrian past Ponies were just dumb animals being kept as beasts of burden by Humans, and once the Humans faded out and Ponies ascended to sapience they kept much of the trappings of Human culture and society and technology because that’s what they knew how to interact with, and people who evolved from herd animals don’t have the same drive for innovation and experimentation as people who evolved from troop animals.

cool!

Hm. It’d be pretty hard to bend your hoof out and away from the body. If the wedge were flipped around, you’d be pulling it toward the body, which most have an easier time of.

Earth ponies sure do pony in hard mode.
 
When you think about it, they must have blacksmiths and farriers/fashionable horseshoe shops all over the place. Ask those gals. I bet they use simple mechanisation like water-driven tilt hammers a lot, with things like this for the fine work.
 
I can see quick-tightening straps like old-fashioned bicycle toestraps being more popular than regular buckles. And a very personal item given the pony spit all over them.

@danielericiverson  
There are several designs of tools and weapons meant to be used with hooves or mouth already. It’s the show itself which uses stuff more useful for humans, like shovels hith handle and bows (cutie marks)

There should be more designs for objects and tools designed for ponies, especially with the fanbase having been around and very sizable for well over four years.