This is not a problem with my Glowforge, it works great. It’s a growing problem with the UI. As my business is growing, and more people are cutting things for me, we’re quickly hitting the limitations of the UI. I really need a way to organize or filter the designs that show up in my home page.
-There are about 1000 designs in my home page.
-I actively use about 200-300 of them.
-Searching for a specific design within that 1000 is really time consuming.
-I don’t want to get rid of most of them, because many of them have settings I’d like to save for future use.
-I can’t use the “Ctrl-F” finder in my browser to find something, because the whole page is not loaded at the same time.
I would love to have the ability to make folders. But if that is too difficult, can you consider giving us a “search” button to filter all the designs and easily find the ones we care about.
Being able to just click on a design, and have it open ready to cut with the right settings is great. It makes it really easy for my wife and kids to do. They don’t have to know all the details about each setting. Uploading the file each time, and customizing the settings is not as easy, and will require some documentation.
I’m looking at other solutions, but just having a “search” button would save me from having to find other solutions.
Totally agree. It’s been asked for many times. I’ve just lost many hours work because files or settings were removed. It’s not built to be a cloud storage solution.
I know it’s been asked many times. I’ve been here since the start. I’ve personnally asked for it before about a year ago. But I’m asking again, hoping that by asking, they may reprioritize it.
It’s the whole “squeeky wheel gets the grease” thing.
I’ve never had my files or settings removed, so I have not experienced that.
It’s great until you click on a file and something else opens up. I gave up 2 years ago as P&S could never help.
But I do understand the wish for a way to organize in the UI–many of us have voiced that before, too…
But it is MUCH faster and reliable for me to find the file I want per my own organization structure of folders by image types in my computer, as well as not relying yet again on speed of the internet/cloud to find my files–or store them.
I understand that it’s faster for you to find the files in your computer, but the jobs I run often have a lot of different settings. I don’t want my kids/wife to have to enter those each time, because they often make mistakes. I tried that. Even if I write down what they are, they sometimes forget, or mistype something, or forget one.
I’m not asking for a feature that is difficult to implement. A search bar is pretty universal in most web applications. It’s a problem that has already been solved. They just have to apply it to their UI.
Until that happens, you can SAVE settings and give them a name, e.g. 3mm MDF or 0.25 translucent blue, so that can help. But users just have to make sure they use the correct settings for the material selected.
And there’s nothing connecting the artwork/settings saved in the UI with the material being used–so what you’re trying to solve will not work if your wife or kids use a different material than was used the previous time for that artwork.
Alas they, like all of us, just need to learn the discipline to use the equipment set ups properly to avoid damaging the unit and avoid wasting material.
You don’t know that. As best as I can tell, GF did not “write the code” for the dashboard, and implementing search or filters may indeed be something they don’t have the expertise to implement.
I’d love to be wrong, but (again) I would never trust my files and settings to be there and correct…
I agree with @polarbrainfreeze. It’s time to get this folder and file organization implemented. Yes, we have the original files. Yes, the files in the design section can get borked. But as @takitus mentioned last week, there are some files that you use constantly, especially for folks in a production environment. Having these files organized would be immensely helpful.
We know it isn’t trivial or they would have done it by now. And we might not quite grasp the complexity of this issue for them. Doesn’t matter. It’s a basic technology that one takes for granted no matter what application you are using.
I’m patient. But we have been in on the conversation for a long time. It’s ok to remind folks that we still care. In the end, it will be a plus for the whole endeavor.
One option for super-techies, is to use a browser automation tool, such as Selenium to automate the web UI tasks. It controls browsers as if it were a human. It takes some setup to get working right, but a spreadsheet with file locations and settings would allow you to make quick work of uploading the right file each time and automatically setting up the settings.
Of course, it’d be much cooler if GF set up a feature to be able to upload settings with the svg files.
I just fooled with downloading the source of the page and stripping out elements I didn’t need.
At the very least I got a (very ugly) searchable page. With some parsing this could work until glowforge finally does something about it.
Just load up your projects, view all, scroll to the bottom, let everything load. Then, save the page (in chrome) as a “webpage, complete”, and then save it somewhere. Doubleclick on that version and you have a snapshot that will open in your browser and look like hot garbage… but at least control-F works.
It’s a really dumb workaround. I’ve been complaining about the scroll to load javascriptiness of it all for a while now, they just don’t seem to be changing it anytime soon.
Beyond that, it wouldn’t be hard to parse the resulting saved HTML to make a custom bookmark file, which is essentially a very stripped down html page anyway.
But none of this should be necessary. User experience has languished for too long.
Thanks @evansd2. That sounds like a feasible solution (for someone who is slightly techie). I’ll give that a shot if I don’t hear anything promising from the GF team.
If the web brower ctrl-f doesn’t work you may be able to find your project with Chrome dev tools. Hit shift-ctrl-c to open the dev tools panel, then use its find function. That might scroll you to the right spot.
But they should offer proper feature support, yes.
I’m sorry for the frustration when trying to manage a large number of designs in your library. Thank you for providing additional information regarding this feature request. We haven’t announced anything like that yet, but I’m going to send these additional suggestions to our product team with a note that it came from a customer request.
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