Sorry, I don’t have posting privileges over in tips and tricks and that board guided me here.
Is there a way to organize or group together prints we’ve uploaded to the app for easier relocating?
I’ve uploaded a lot of prints to the glowforge app in the almost two years I’ve been forging.
I do delete prints I know I’ll never need again to keep the number down, but sometimes I sell a product on etsy that I make on demand, or somebody messages me on social media and asks for a copy of a piece I posted months ago, or I just have a complex project that involves multiple cuts across different sheets or materials.
In the app’s flat presentation I may be scrolling back for a while to find a job I might have last ran months ago.
Ctrl+F (find) is my friend here, once I view all prints and if I remember part of the name , but it’s still just onerous enough to make me wonder if I’m doing this the hard way.
It would be useful if we could create folders or groups in the app, into which we can move print jobs we want to keep together (perhaps that are thematically or project related).
But is there already a way to do this sort of organization that I’m overlooking?
Has anyone else found a good way to handle organizing and navigating a large number of print jobs in the app?
Unfortunately there are no folders or such but something you can do is rename your project files. When you do this the renamed file goes to the front so rename several that go together and you will find them together.
You can also include words that you might be thinking later.
Another thing I do when I realize that this project is a keeper is to gather all the source files into a folder on my PC with notes and such and then make sure that folder is somewhere where it is getting backed up to the cloud incase my PC decides to die.
I’ve asked for this function in the past along with other users, but have never heard from anyone at Glowforge on their position on this item. I’ve been told by others that from a software development point of view it should be something that is fairly simple to do.
I really disliked this oversight in the software in the past, but now it has become the one thing I hate about my glowforge.
I can’t think of any other software program that allows files to be stored with no way of sorting, filtering or organizing. I would be much more productive if such a feature existed.
It might be easy from a software development point of view, but only the people familiar with the internal structure of the app would know the real difficulty of adding this feature. I’ve worked on software projects where a seemingly simple feature took a lot of effort to add because of the underlying structure of the project.
Hierarchical object management interfaces are nothing new (GUI’s are how old now?), but integrating it into the app interface in a way so that every user can make the most of it is probably their biggest concern.
They have added features to the app that were exactly what I wanted in the past. At one point I was so tired of putting in custom speed/power settings that I poked around the interface with an eye toward creating a browser extension to auto-fill settings for me. I set it aside (I’d rather be cutting stuff after all) and poof, one day the ability to save my own settings appeared in the app. That one’s saved me a lot of typing.
So who knows, maybe in time we’ll get this feature.
Except due to the way the ui loads jobs only on scrolling control f won’t work properly.
You can download the html and extract the urls of all your jobs, they’re deep linkable and can be bookmarked. I posted some theoretical work on this but never went further.
Yeah I built a quick and dirty extractor that would turn these links into a workable page but it was just an experiment and I never published it.
Oh duh (on me), In the past I had noticed the job links were stable and linkable, but it never crossed my mind to just scrape them from the list page.
So I fiddled around with the browser inspector and the console and wrote a JS snippet to pull my job names and links, ready for pasting into a tab of the google sheet where I track GF related stuff. And saved the code for future use. Had to employ a cheap trick to get around the virtual scrolling, but I think I got them all.
Now to craft a naming scheme that will make sense to future me…
What glowforge doesn’t employ is a user community voting on items in the hopper. I think those businesses that allow users to vote on potential features let the community know the business cares about what the community wants, and it really is a great way for the business to know what exactly the community really wants. Now that doesn’t mean they have to always follow the order of most votes of the community. There may be improvements or features we didn’t know were possible, or we didn’t know we wanted, BUT I’m sure there would be a few items that might surprise glowforge at how many users really care about some features over others. @dan last update said he was dedicated to making improvements without having to landfill our units. My guess is this one is greatly desired.
When I was fiddling with it the jobs in the html changed as I scrolled up and down, it seemed to be using virtual paging. Though my jquery selector-fu might not have been targeting accurately or maybe they were all just hidden somewhere I wasn’t looking. Anyway my cheap trick was to zoom out as far as I could in the browser, until all 188 of my saved jobs were displayed as little thumbnails, then run the js to scrape them. Hey ho, it worked this time, but I bet there’s an upper limit. A better way would probably be to add a scroll handler that updates the set of joblinks, then scroll the length of the list so they all get seen and added.
I was spitballing the organization problem, and figured I could (laboriously) name/rename my jobs using a separator character (dash probably) to hierarchically arrange the jobs virtually into “folders”, the dash serving similar to slashes in a path, sort of a poor man’s filesystem, that I’d use to organize them in my google sheet.
lol Who am I kidding, I’m too busy cutting stuff to go to such lengths.
, but it’s still just onerous enough to make me wonder if I’m doing this the hard way.