Discussion of April 2020 update

The premium features, while they disappoint me, don’t come as a surprise. This had to happen, they’ve taken on a ton of funding from VC’s who at this point probably want to see growth. Subscription models are one of the stickiest revenue sources out there, they are set-and-forget and they auto-renew.

To me the software subscription model just proves that their original subscription model Proofgrade either didn’t sell well enough or didn’t provide consistent enough revenue to make accurate growth projections. Yearly recurring subscriptions are very easy to project in comparison and the number of people that cancel subscriptions is usually very low.

While I wouldn’t ever say that Glowforge ever had the true Maker mindset, they’ve now gone all in on being a boring consumer grade device. One that works well, just lacks that hack, tinker, make spirit.

In short hardware startups are hard and most fail if they cannot find a good source of recurring revenue.

edit:

Juicero for life!

I still say that serious design should be in an external design app. The ui editor doesn’t hold a candle to a proper external editor for even moderately complicated work. Go make a kerf adjusted inlaid finger jointed box with the design tools, I’ll race you. If you ever reach the finish line I suspect your quality won’t match what can be done in something like Inkscape.

Cutting fifty copies of a design? Aligning them is no simple trick. Want to change those copied designs? There’s no clone feature so you’d have to modify each one by hand. Want to change a raster to a vector or vice versa? The list goes on… standalone design apps are still vastly more capable.

Back to the box example: now that you’ve designed your kerf adjusted box, oops go make it an inch wider. You’ll pretty much have to start over.

Also don’t gloss over that GF doesn’t (currently) let you export your design. Let’s say you create an earring in the gf UI and sell it at a craft fair. You can’t sell the design at Etsy or take that design and cut it with a cricut/other laser brand.

The design tools are ok but they have serious limitations.

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I wouldn’t take that challenge and I don’t want to see that level of design tools in GFUI. Even if they made a wonderful set of tools, not being able to export anything is a total deal killer for me too.

But things like they just added seem 100% appropriate, and I remember past arguments about where the line should be drawn much differently than @shop.

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I’m just happy I can finally be sure I didn’t accidentally scale my perfectly kerf adjusted part in the GFUI as I was moving it around.

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Years ago I had asked Dan if we would be able to download our designs from the dash and he said “It wouldn’t do us any good because they are stored in a different format” if I recall.

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Hey @PrintToLaser! I’m trying to remember the context, but that’s sort of technically true (it’s a customized version of SVG, as I recall) but not an insurmountable problem. It’s in the feature hopper for sure.

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( Create a flowing cutline around your design with just one click. )
What Happened To This In The beta Update??? It Was So Awesome To Have Can You Please Bring It Back??? It Made Our Work A Million Times Easier But Now Its Gone… Please,Please,Please If At All Possible Bring It Back Tom… Thank You…J.D.

image
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Im Silly Excited about the pass through software update. I cant wait to cut without that little tick of a MM off. This is the reason I got the @glowforge.

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Well I have good news and bad news.

Bad first? OK. That tick is still there in many passthrough cuts. This isn’t perfect.

Now for the good… It’s much easier to do, and I did say only “many” cuts. Some will be so dead on that you’ll just cackle like a mad scientist.

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CAN NOT WAIT! I want to get my dirty mittens on this software.
Hope the bugs are worked out soon so we all can play.

Thanks for the update.

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Oh my gosh. I’m overwhelmed and I had work to do and now I have to play with my GF because #update!

I love the trial features.

I understand exporting our designs is in “the hopper.” I am anxiously await this. It is important to me, particularly where the icons are concerned.

I do also love all of the fonts.

I did want to weld two rectangles together but could not find how to do so. Is welding shapes possible now? If not, is it under consideration for The Hopper? <-- should be its own hashtag.

Thank you This is terrific.

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Moving the most recently used design to the top, may be helpful to some, but having some kind of file organization is imperative. I’m still wondering why this hasn’t been included yet.
For someone who has 100s of designs, it is very difficult to be able to quickly find the correct design and start printing. Any insight if/when this will be added?

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I do love all the updates. I don’t like that I have to click twice to upload a design, click Create > then click Upload.

Even more of a pressing issue:
I am also not a fan of the last item being used is now re-ordered on my page. I upload similar designs and those are visually grouped together (my way of getting around no folders), and the re-order is a hinderance on searching for the items. Especially since I still can not search on the page to find the title of the object.

Please @Staff and @Dan help a girl out

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If you’re on a desktop computer just drag your art to the Glowforge dashboard and a new design will be created.

i am with you on the reordering of the library issue. It wrecks havoc. it is a poor implementation of the feature best described as “i would like it to be easy to open my most recent project”. Many people would like that, including me. However, the way it got delivered leaves a lot to be desired especially since there are no other sorting options or folders implemented. I suggest that a better implementation would be to offer “latest” as an option under the green “create” button.

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i’d rather just have folders. or at least some metadata keywords that we can apply so it’s easy to search on.

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My upload trees are fine, heavens knows about my finder/explorer windows.

I’m confused on this one.

The 4/27 update stopped that from happening. My library has not “re-ordered” since then, despite working with “older” designs - they stay where they were.

I have been using this software often for small designs and it works well. I would buy a subscription if a weld or union function is available. That would be a make or break for me. It is frustrating to get through a design and then realize that you cut half of it off and there is no way to fix it but to recreate your design with another software platform. I really hope this function becomes available in the future. Thanks and keep up the great work!