Not sure if this is the right place to suggest an improvement, but here it is:
I have some designs I print a lot of. And then I have a hundred other designs, some I never use again (and should just delete) but many that I may want to keep. What happens is that when I want to print an earlier design, I have to click SEE MORE again and scour my personal catalog to find the design. It would be nice to either:
(a) be able to “pin” or “star” a design so that it shows up at the top of the list of designs, a “favorites” section if you will, or
(b) at least have a search function on designs so I could find them quickly.
The problem of finding a design is becoming worse and worse as my favorites are pushed further and further back, buried under all the new things I print every day. Oh, to have a favorites section for those I produce often!
Pinning designs is a really cool idea! The organization idea is as old as this forum, but the favorites one is new to me.
What some people have done, including myself, is just uploading the design again. Is it the best solution to the problem? No. Simple organization within the UI is, but who knows when that will come along. What I find strange is that the Glowforge team has rolled out the “saved settings” feature, so they encourage you to use your already uploaded designs, but they make it difficult to find that design again. Not only that, but those settings shouldn’t be relied on forever because that data has been purged before.
I guess it just comes down to learning the quirks of the tool we have. Best practices I’ve picked up is recording my own settings in an excel spreadsheet, especially for projects I’m going to come back to. I’m in the same boat as you, though, I’d really appreciate another level of organization within the UI, and that’s not because of my own lack of organization. Sometimes I change a design within the UI and so the saved settings thing is nice, but like I mentioned, not permanent.
On my computer I have several generations of designs as they often fork into other ideas, A rename and copy might be good where the Catalog designs are used as you cant bring anything back to the computer. Also there are designs that I manage to get sized or copy/pasted that would be good to do a Save-as so as not mess with the original, As yet I have managed to do an undo or reload a design but there have been a few times that the undos were too quick and the GFUI crashed leaving me at whatever it was at that point. This has not happened at a critical case yet but an Undo-back button that did not step through each nudge would be really nice.
Oh and add a second to that pinning idea, I cant think of the many times I have had to search for the horizontal cut line i use so often,
That’s a great idea for a feature - thanks for the suggestion! We haven’t announced anything like that yet, but I’m going to send it to our product team with a note that it came from a customer request.