The Glowforge Talk Show #7 - We talk about the current happenings in Glowforgeland. Dan provided us a video with demo of the Trace & Resize function with a sneak peek of the Glowforge UI.
Thanks @dan!
Awesome and cute, thanks crew
And thanks @dan i love a good short dirty video over a glam vid
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Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Nice to see you guys at it again.
@dan these types of videos are very welcome.
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Nice to be able to register faces against names/.
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Just wait till you see what we have planned for Maker Faire - some really delightful stuff! TBD if it’ll be ready for Seattle but we’ll have it ready to rock for New York.
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Thanks for the sneak peek at the current state of the UI @dan! Of course, now a few questions/ideas come to mind.
The first thing I noticed is how quickly the bed image was captured and sent to the computer. This made me wonder what the file size of the captured image is. Those of us with painfully slow ISPs, especially on the upload side might expect a little longer on the transfer. Can you share the size of that image file?
The second thing that popped in my head after seeing the enlargement of your sketch was that it might be useful to have access to the vector trace as an editable file. Do you have any plans to make the vector accessible so that we can manipulate it in say Ai to smooth out or adjust to our liking before sending back to the laser? I know there are any number of ways to convert raster to vector outside of the GF software, but after seeing the process it sure seems convenient to have a “Download SVG” option built in.
Impressive as always…
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@dan, will we have the option to set an order to the cuts after it is traced? For example, could you have told it to cut out the outline of the face last?
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Thanks, I had not yet seen that… Maybe with enough interest it will be a hoppered idea.
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“Wasn’t anything fancy.”
Holy cow, lies. I got positively giddy watching how slick and awesome everything was. The UI looks great – I love that it gives you the time, and follows the progress on screen and looked super, super intuitive.
Well done, @dan and everyone.
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@dan, this is exactly the kind of video that I was wanting to see. I am really impressed with the interface. Thank you soooo much for taking the time to share it with us.
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Before I start, let me say I’m a Kool-Aid drinker 
I bought a Pro and am sticking with it even though I (like Stephanie) have multiple lasers I use already.
I’ll also be at the NY Makerfaire to see what the “delightful” stuff is that Dan plans to show.
In the meantime, this is interesting but by and large isn’t much different than what we’ve seen before. I get it that one of the use cases is making something hand drawn. But I’ll suggest that is a one-trick pony for dabblers to use. The rest of the population will be using design software to create things. We’ve not seen that happen - where I take an SVG file and run it through the process. The “draw it & cut it” use case just isn’t useful enough for most people - they can’t draw anything that they’d likely be proud of. Consider your drawing skills and decide if that’s really how you’re going to use this to create things.
I don’t disagree there’s a market for that kind of use but I’d expect it’s mostly in the schools where kids will use this as an intro to the technology. Some will use it as a springboard to learning design software and truly exercising the potential of the technology. But to be truly useful, it’s got to do more than cut out pictures drawn with a black marker.
It seems like the next step up in terms of quality of the finished product using this “draw it” function would be taking a photocopy of some scroll saw pattern. The intricate lines and details (there was a brief shot in the video of what appears to be a library of similar stuff in the software) of those patterns would be a real test of the machine & software. Can you take that and make a replicant? That’s what many folks might want to do. Scroll work brought to the masses.
But I’d bet even that will lose people’s interest after awhile. Think about how many 3D Printers are getting dusty even though there’s a near infinite number of doo-dads you can download from Thingiverse.
Sooner or later more complex stuff, created from design software (Corel/AI/Inkscape/etc) is what’s going to provide the real test of the machine and its controlling software. I’d like to see that. This would have been a nice place to show it - we’ll all sit and watch a video of a 10 minute cut . The Talkshow is a captive audience of already committed GFers. There’s plenty of time to show a real work process and the results. I’m dissapointed that opportunity was lost.
I’d bring something challenging with me to NY but the “standard Sharpie” drawing doesn’t allow for much precision so the scroll work stuff won’t work. I could bring an SVG or other file but that’s not in the invitation and I can see why Dan wouldn’t want to tie up the machine for a long time doing something intricate and detailed - it’s Marketing 101 to hook em with the sizzle & flash.
BTW, there’s an interesting Open Source project out there called LaserWeb (I think it’s up to version 3 now) that has a similar UI. Not sure if they’re watching these “sneak peeks” or if it’s just coming to the same design from different points of view.
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@dan could we hopper this one please? It may be nice for a personal backup of traced files also.
It doesn’t seem terribly difficult to add a download button but I’m no programmer and I don’t want to slow down the delivery of my Glowforge.
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Okay @dan, if you have had opportunity to watch GF Talkshow #7, you know I have a bet on the table with @karaelena.
I think it was a bit of a sucker bet because Glowforge will come through (sorry Yves)! Hoping everything keeps running as smoothly as predicted in the Glowforge offices!! Go team!!
Thanks so much for making the latest video. I am very impressed with the user interface. Wow!
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Thank you for the demo @dan!
Repositioning and sizing were just as I had hoped, great to see it in action.
Easy and intuitive UI, salute to the the staff that hammered that out! Nice Work People!
Can’t stop smiling…
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I met Rebecca in San Mateo. Now I meet the rest of the cast in New York (hopefully).
Love the nametag overlay. I think I missed a few episodes over the summer, so those might not be new, but I like them.
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That’s a feature of hangouts, the ability to display a banner with any message you like as an identifier.
I’m afraid I may never meet anyone here irl…
There are a few flags on the map within 15 miles or so of me, so ! maybe - but I am jealous!
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I think we are all hoping you win that bet!
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