As stated before one the forum (Many times before). You don’t need to have the QR code for any of the PF materials. You can pick it from the materials menu. You can do multi-materials in one op. I’ve posted a couple examples of that.
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Yes!
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Yes, the software will treat different colors as separate steps, and you can set individual parameters for each, or ignore them individually.
So you could have different materials on the bed and assign file aspects to any of them.
An example would be @dwardio’s cut file where circle, square or cut line could be individually assigned across materials.
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Just to throw a bit of Devil’s Advocate cold water on this very elaborate system… I could far more easily just take any personally sourced material and write a personal [A-Z0-9]{1,2} digit code (1296 combinations) on it during storage. Then – since the Glowforge UI is web-based and allows you to manually enter settings – use a Chrome extension to automatically form-fill the settings based on my 2-digit code I type.
Sure, using the QR reader abilities would be nice… but running a macro is just as simple.
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You actually don’t even need the sticker; you can just manually specify any PG material. 
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What a nice experience! Thanks for sharing what you learned from it! I think this community is really just that… a community. What a great bunch of folks we’ve been introduced to!
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Has that been committed as a permanent feature of the GFUI? I thought I saw something that said it was a short-term fix to allow for the issues we were having being able to “see” a valid code on the PG material due to camera & distortion issues.
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Only staff can really say if it’s permanent or not, but it was a huuuge relief to see this change in the UI. I really hope they keep it.
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Guessing the capability will stay available. Would be pretty stupid not to continue to provide a feature that improves the experience.
I imagine some bean counter might think that making the Proofgrade features exclusive could drive material sales but all it would really do is promote dissatisfaction with the interface. A very early post suggesting that hiding Proofgrade settings was a way to ensure users would not be disappointed with non-PG results was kind of silly. Hiding that basic feature would make everyone unhappy. (Similarly, the ability to save our own settings has always been a core requirement.)
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Correct. The UV ink is kind of magical. The whole thing is covered with it, but you literally cannot see it.
All true.
Also true.
Lots of folks have ideas for how they want it to work: Just like it does now. Print your own barcodes. Type in material codes.
The plan of record right now is to remove saved Proofgrade settings, which have already caused their share of support problems (but are a necessary evil right now). We plan to replace them with saved “your own” settings, so you can record whatever works best for you on your own non-PG materials. (That may or, more likely, may not be the same settings used for similar-looking Proofgrade materials).
Like all plans, though, we’ll continue to listen to reports from customers about what works and what doesn’t, and see if that’s the best path.
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And you keep listening to the users, considering the suggestions, and work for ways to make everything better. Keep that up, and we’ll keep dropping ideas all over you. Like you, we want the best tool you can make.
I like the idea of having saved settings. The problem is that I expect to work with so many different materials that I expect it to take a lot of effort to brows through previous settings for the right one where having some kind of shortcut code, such as the 
QR codes for various materials could take some searching. I will keep a notebook of settings for specific not materials I use, if I need, but I think 
has the technological capability for so much more.
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@dan wrote:
The UV ink is kind of magical. The whole thing is covered with it, but you literally cannot see it.
Sounds like 9,10 diphenyl anthracene (DPA). It is the blue UV stimulated dye in glowsticks, but is colorless in visible light.
But presumably no problem if you had a uv lamp ?
That is correct. Festivals and nightclubs use it to mark the hands of patrons. If GF has a UV source, an array of ink jet printed invisible dots or some other image, printed on the Proofgrade masking, might allow focus corrections or alignment gridlines to be made.
I’d rather the orange from the US $10 note or the red from I forget which bill.
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I’d guess that once glowforges are out in the wild, the forum will have plenty of suggested settings for various materials - some will be better than others, but also the proofgrade guesses will be better for some materials than others.
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what happens if somebody wants to make things to put in a nightclub with proofgrade material? 
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It’s all on a masking material not the actual material.
That being said, there are some examples of leaving the mask on for greater contrast from the PRU and beta users that look great
So long as the visible aspect of the masking is the same, that will remain unchanged. It might even make some very striking products under a UV lamp. Laser cut WITH blacklight elements.
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I hope that Glowforge users will be able to save and share profiles for materials the way 3D printer users can (e.g. Simplify3D FFF files). Though since the whole Glowforge process is online, they could be shared between files without saving and loading files. Perhaps a user generated profile library?