How to Get Regular Status Updates on your Own
I know it’s not an update from Dan, and it’s in it’s infancy…but there are new threads going up by @marmak3261 about the Pre-Release units that you all might want to go and read through.
He is video taping as much as he can, from the arrival of the machine at his doorstep, to the unboxing, the setup, using the software, and showing the results of his first prints…
He’s just a user like we are, and he’s being open about everything he sees. It’s one of the ways that we are getting information about how to use the machines. (And showing that they do, in fact, actually exist, chuckle!)
This is what we are going to do when they come…it’s worth taking a look at.
(And he might not have figured out how to go about doing fancy things with it yet, so try not to ask him to build a replica of the Eiffel tower just yet. 
) He is going to work his way through things like connectivity issues, using the machine on various devices and assorted issues as he goes along.
It’s a pretty major undertaking, so be understanding, just look, and don’t slow him down. The Regular users here have got a lot of things for him to test, working with Glowforge, and you will get to see some of the actual development and testing as it happens.
If you keep following along those threads, you’re going to have a pretty good idea of how things are going overall. So that is an excellent way to get some pretty detailed input into how things stand.
@dan might or might not be able to give regular “official” updates to us…this is one way that we can keep up with what is going on.
And one last thing… @marmak3261 has an outside job as well, and he is not required to show this to us, so this is a voluntary thing that he is doing to help the rest of us, on his schedule … be nice. The development threads are not the place to argue anything, they are the place to work out problems so that the machine can be improved. Further refinement of processes for how to do specific design requests in the software are going to come later, so they don’t need to be asked now. If it gets to be too much, they might have to move the development back to the Beta forum and we won’t get to see it.
(The Betas do have their own forum where they can discuss problems and solutions without getting swamped with questions from us, and switching those threads to that one requires a single click.)
All of the Beta Projects and Pre-Release Projects can be found in the Made On A Glowforge Category.
Also please note that the members are now gathering a list of Weekly Highlights threads in the Everything Else category which will continue to list these and other important posts.