(1) Shapes are kinda neat. Would be great to save your work once you create something. I tend to have a ton of things in the design space. Would be neat to work on something, save it, move on.
(2) Fonts - Not a want, but a must have… if you can’t weld letters what is the point. Example: I am doing a sign with my daughters name and I went to go cut and see that there are cut lines where the font should continue on. Now… I do think there should be the option, but if a font is touching… chances are the maker doesn’t want the letters spliced through.
(3) Outlining feature is super cool! Thanks!
Nothing else for now, but fonts thing needs to get fixed to make it super valuable.
Julie
You can save - they are saved automatically just like other designs, there’s nothing special about the shapes. Just return to home, and start a new design (or open an existing one.)
I saw the same content on the gf site when I made decision to buy. Agree it was promoted as having passthrough software. My machine was delivered Feb or March 2018. It struggles with this, or it could be me. Still sorting that. If it is machine, then I too expect a solunion to make me whole as a customer.
I was prepared to be semi-furious when I saw the news about subscription features, but as the system is described, it seems tolerable. The premium features are so far geared to making the app easier to use for people who are not conversant with desktop design software, and that seems like a fair and useful place to draw a line.
Like many others I worry that in the future we will see a feature go Premium that feels like it should be free… I guess that is inevitable.
When pricing is revealed I sincerely hope it is affordable enough that I can subscribe without sweating the decision and calculating my cost-per-use. If the price is high, then I hope we will be allowed to subscribe for a single month, should Premium offer me a feature that I need to do a specific task.
I would also like to take this opportunity to stick my tongue out, fully extended, and go tttthhhhpppbbbbttt at every single person who has said, “DESIGN SHOULD BE 100% IN TEH DESIGN APPLARGH!!” I am so glad Glowforge is giving us Precision Position as a free upgrade, and taking other steps to smash the design barrier and give us useful tools.
to be fair, i don’t think the vast majority of people who might say “keep design in the design app” would have any issue with precise positioning in the app. in fact, i’d posit that pretty much everyone has asked for this since before we even saw the first screen capture of the UI and it wasn’t there.
Wow, step out for a couple months and everything changes GF would be foolish to not go subscription on some level. I’m just glad it seems to be only for new features revolving more around design and less around general use.
I wonder what else has changed since I took my hiatus…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
( 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.
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.
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.
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?
GF would be foolish to not go subscription on some level. I’m just glad it seems to be only for new features revolving more around design and less around general use.
