Yeah, I’m in this bucket too and it’s a lot of why I am always thinking and typing out-loud about how these pieces could work together better.
GF opens up an api
Yeah, I think this is the real answer. I read the older posts here asking about 'Will there be a GF API?" before I typed out my use case from a black box perspective but purposely didn’t go down that route. I think I just wanted to describe the ideal flow without getting into the details of an API answer right off the bat.
I think allowing any svg editor app the ability to request a view of the bed and then send along basic cut job settings is the best answer for everyone. In this way Boxy, or Illustrator, or figma or whatever app could simply add it in as an option. The plumbing is in place to feed the GF web UI already and since I’ve also been in the sw biz since the late 90s of course I’m not saying that it wouldn’t be a bunch of work to make this available to third parties but I do think it would remove a lot of drudgery from the process.
some people just enjoy the challenge of making it work
+1 to this. After my last reply I started poking around in the JS debugger to see if I could work out how to maybe build a Chrome extension to make it do what I want. =)
there’s one user here who created a chrome extension to save settings. unfortunately it broke when GF updated the GFUI to have settings saved inside the GFUI, but it was a great timesaver while it was around.
and that’s the downside to create w/o an API of some sort. the GFUI is a web interface and can change w/o notice and it’s not an update you run on installed software. so things can break easily.
Educated assumptions that are most likely not wrong. Software development is pretty much the same everywhere, and it’s a constant battle balancing development resources to deliverables.
One of the original selling points for me was that they had said there would be an Illustrator plugin. I haven’t heard it mentioned by GF in quite a while. I still want it.