I’m wondering if the process will be more like Apple: we know what’s best for you so sit on your hands while we take care of you. Not saying this is bad or anything, just that is how I feel. If something is wrong with my iPhone, it’s got to be my fault. Benevolent dictator.
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I’ve always gotten the impression that Dan is an Apple guy. Seems obvious to me, really. Apple people… think different. I’m also not saying that’s a bad. Just that it’s usually pretty clear. I, being a non-Apple person… a Windows and Android person… want the ability to make decisions for myself. Defaults are a great place to start. I don’t want to start from scratch! I just want to be able to do things my way when I want to. The Apple group, on the other hand, take things as they are, and either accepts them or… well, there’s very little recourse. But those people tend to be the ones that prefer to have any guesswork taken out. Do it for me, they say. And I do understand the appeal of that. I really do. It’s just not for me.
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Didn’t he spend the early part of his career at Microsoft? I seem to recall his mentioning a Surface as a daily driver, but might be mixing him up with someone else.
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Could be! Doesn’t mean he’s not an Apple guy at heart and mind. 
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I think he died a little inside reading that.
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All about target audience. You and I want to take it all apart and rebuild it. Most not really.
LOL! I don’t usually laugh reading posts. Thanks for that!
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I want to… tweak it, is all. My days of taking things apart and rebuilding… okay, they’re not done. I admit that. But in this case I just want to… I dunno… tinker a bit.
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I was actually a die hard windows user most of my life. PC gamer, etc. The first apple product I had was their keyboard, because it looked cool, worked well, and had 2 extra USB ports on it. Then the iphone, which before that I had a motorola Q and a separate mp3 player, both which couldnt fit in my pocket at the same time. I still use an iphone, but still jailbreak it as well.
The biggest issue I had with Mac computers for a long time, was how unfriendly they were to fixing/changing. That is still true with the hardware to some degree, but now I have a couple of macbooks and love them. I still have a desktop windows PC for oculus and high performance stuff that wont run on mac hardware, but I can run a windows VM on my mac to do most everything else. Ever since they switched over to a unix back end, osx became way more customizable and was now a UI running on top of a shell. Windows still has some of that shell functionality, but its not anywhere close to as good natively as the mac experience. If it werent for the hardware limitations of macs, I might not have a PC.
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perhaps don’t be so quick to assume why people use the tools they do
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I’ve made horsecollar tranfers from helos twice in the waters off the Grand Banks (near where that scene was supposedly set). All I could think of was keeping my feet clear of the deck (pitching up & down in 15-foot seas) until the guy with the grounding strap hooked on to the pendant above me… 
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My curiosity has been piqued by this topic. How “quiet” are these automatic updates? Are we notified that they have happened? Is there a current version number we can check? Or will we suddenly notice things work differently and we can only assume it was due to an update?
How many updates have you pre-production users experienced since you got your machine? (@takitus, @marmak3261, @karaelena, @iliketomakestuff, @rebecca have I forgotten others on this forum?)
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No way to know. It’s invisible.
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I recall that you mentioned one time that you suddenly had new abilities for engraving photos. Was that the only time you noticed a change in features?
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Yeah. Unless it changed visibly in the UI, there is no other signifier currently.
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I should say… I absolutely love Apple hardware and software. Fast, clean, wonderful OSs. I’m not kidding. Love them. But it’s always the fact that you can’t really get underneath the skin of it that has kept me away. I have a Mac VM, myself. Runs great. I rarely use it though. But when I do, I really appreciate the OS. Reminds me of my Amiga in many ways. AmigaOS had the best of it all. Amazing OS, with a great shell to play in. How I wish it never died. Had it lived, it surely would have ruled them all.
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Is there a “Help - About” sort of feature in the GF UI that might show the version?
Onshape (another cloud-only product) has that and it’s pretty much the only way to tell that things have changed unless you notice something different in the UI or follow their forums. They’ve been doing significant upgrades every 3-4 weeks for the past year or more and more frequent in-line bug fixes. So far as I can tell from their forum traffic that’s not been a problem for any of the users. They seem to have done an extremely good job of organizing the way features will upgrade and interact with other features, though. I hope that GF planned from the beginning to achieve that level of organization and integration.
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No, but then again I have a pre-release unit, and might have things turned off in the UI and on my machine.
Hopefully the full release will have some way to find the software version number. If that isn’t planned, maybe @dan could add it to the hopper.
I can see where that could be useful for folks that like to document what they do with their GFs, especially on jobs that might repeat over months or even years. I do that now with most of the complex, multipart 3D print jobs that I do.
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Maybe one larger change regarding how the materials displayed and are chosen if not Proofgrade. They added a bunch. Recently an addition of caution regarding using non Proofgrade to ensure safe operation. These were cosmetic mainly. As to how the hardware functioned? Other than one update to improve homing speed and a few other things I haven’t noticed a difference.
My focus has been pretty much on getting design done. Once they are ready they just work. Don’t really think about the print process other than a few tests for some new non-Proofgrade.
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