January Update?

Is one coming? Was it bundled into Dec?

Will monthly updates continue post-30 day campaign complete fulfillment?

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I was just going to post about this. Glad I looked through the new posts before I did.
Decembers was on the 17th, seems like the updates are slipping. At first I thought it was a holiday thing. Likely they are waiting for news on the International shipping front, they could of course announce that in another post. There’s no rule that says they can only do one announcement a month.

And they have done more than one before - last summer sometime?

That’s a good point - I forget the international folks are still waiting patiently!

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My guess is they want something interesting to say on every update and this month there just isn’t anything interesting to say. And rather than say "Nothing new. Move along. " they’re waiting another week or so to finish something worth talking about.

I’d like to see @dan include the recent Autosave update in the next email mailout, so that everyone has at least one notice of it. I’m thinking a lot of folks don’t pay attention to anything but the emails.

That was a major concession to us that a lot of people have desperately wanted for a long time. (And it changes the way we have to do things, so a warning is probably not a bad idea.) :smile:

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As much as I keep realistic expectations, I tend not to think of keeping the customers happy and engaged as a concession.

Priorities will shift depending on customer interest.

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I wonder if that qualifies for update-worthy. I mean, it’s a decent feature (would be fantastic if one could save if and when they want to). But I don’t know it qualifies to be in a big monthly company announcement. ButI guess we’ll see! The anticipation is…

It probably depends on how much other stuff they have to talk about.

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Concession?

They subsumed the CAM process into the printer driver and pretended it was all magic but failed to realise every other CAM process remembers settings, saves the result and allows repeat jobs instantly. In re-inventing the wheel they forgot it should rotate effortlessly!

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I agree here. Would much prefer a traditional save “snapshot” system instead of the auto save. I almost never go to the app Home and upload new art, I tend to delete all art and drag a new file onto the ui. As such the autosave hasn’t been a big advantage to me yet.

Customers. We’re the worst. :slight_smile:

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I’m making it work, but honestly, about every time I use it I have to wonder why something in the GFUI wasn’t thought out better in the 2 years they have had to develop it.

WYSIWYG SVG printing. The first hurdle I came up against. I had an SVG with layers and line weights. All I wanted to do was engrave it. Instead, I had to go outside the UI and convert it to bitmap, or take the long path and make it single path SVG. Well that’s not ease of use.

Materials. Yah proofgrade is wonderful. I wish there was more variety. Where’s the Delrin? Two color acrylic? Corian? Hopefully that’s coming.

On the flip side of Proofgrade is the useage if “undocumented” material. We weren’t told that they were going to make using it as difficult as possible. No way to save settings? Really?

Using colors as a method to determine operations is understandable. Using layers is a lot more relatable, and already in most users workflow.

Did you cut lots of pieces only to have one or two not come out the way you wanted? No problem, just have it ignore the other objects, you can turn them back on and have it remember the previous settings. Right? Not using proofgrade? Oh that’s fun.

Autofocus. There is a perfectly good method of determining materials height available, yet you still have to punch it in manually for non- proofgrade. In INCHES no less. Maybe they can’t get clearance to ship to the UK because the UI is in inches not mm. Continuous Autofocus?

Can’t rotate bit maps? Did that not come up in beta testing?

In all, it’s still way better than my old laser. I don’t have to use Windows or Corel, and that’s a huge plus for me. Would I recommend it to a friend? It comes with a list of disclaimers longer than my arm right now. Most of them should have been fixed in the 2 years of beta testing.

I’m sure everyone has their own things that have been hopperized or are waiting for improvements on. Those are the things I want to hear about in the updates.

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I probably disagree with most of your post but since it’s reflecting your feelings I won’t comment on those. This item though is different. The use of layers vs colors in driving a laser is not as cut & dried as you’re suggesting.

There are many lasers that drive the operations by color vs layers. In fact that’s what I’m used to so layers are not “more relatable” to me or most of my students. It’s an awful lot along the lines of Windows vs Unix vs OS/X. I’ve seen as many (maybe more) laser CAM packages/drivers that use colors as layers.

I’m more used to those colors being the only control vs the GF technique of strokes for cuts/scores and fills to identify engraves. I’ve adapted when using the GF vs the Redsail. No biggie. A lot like having to do SVG for the GF and DXF for the Redsail and Corel “print” for the K40. And VCarve for the Shopbot and Kinetic for the High Z CNC.

As with everything YMMV. :slight_smile:

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Ditto.

And I’ve seen a lot of evidence that people don’t pay attention to those, either. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

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While separating operations by color may be the norm in the laser world, I’m not sure Ive seen an artist or designer use this method.
My old laser used layers. In my opinion , the benefit is during the design process is that there is a quick method to turn layers on and off, by color not so much. Yes, you can assign all the objects in a layer to a color, but that’s an extra step, and again in my opinion, an unnecessary one.
It’s not a big deal, I would just think that using the thing that most people already have in their workflow would make it easier for those who haven’t had the pleasure of working with other lasers. I find myself sometimes unable to distinguish the colors in my cuts properly. Since they are hairline width they don’t show up so well. MMDV. :slight_smile:
I don’t run into the bitmap issue often, but there have been a few times I wanted to put something on a pice of scrap, and wish I could easily rotate it.

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Maybe you’ll see something when other formats are introduced, maybe not (probably not). The Glowforge currently has a limited number of formats that it accepts. The most widely used of those formats is SVG.

SVG does not support layers.

SVG has no support for a true z-index.

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An excellent point. :wink:

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Air filter progress would be news…

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I was also just going to post concerning a January update. I’ve been checking every day for one. Seems this month has been the longest it’s taken for one. A bit concerning

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