Peek at the User Interface

Regarding the storage capacity of an account, how many files have you had in there? I wonder if the ‘show more’ configuration wouldn’t be a reflection of them not wanting each user to have hundreds of files in there. It certainly would be a deterrent.
I had asked previously what the allotted space is and don’t remember an answer.

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This would be so useful for me! I tend to fall down the rabbit hole, doing numerous iterations of a design, each with subtle tweaks … and for as much as I try to take detailed notes on what I was doing, sometimes I miss something or get distracted by a family member/phone call/life. A “history” file would be so very helpful.

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Right now I have 64 of my own things in there and another 10 or 12 of theirs. On my 24" monitor I get 8 across by 2 rows per “more” button click.

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Thanks for posting this! It’s been great to see all the cool things folks have been making, but we’ve been missing the “how” have they been made.

I can’t wait to jump in and mess around with the interface.

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Im sitting at 178 currently.

[quote=“PrintToLaser, post:11, topic:7753”] I wonder if the ‘show more’ configuration wouldn’t be a reflection of them not wanting each user to have hundreds of files in there. It certainly would be a deterrent.
[/quote]

I would hope its not there as a deterrent. There are much better ways to manage this than by providing a poor user experience. They can have any number of limits which they can show your current status of. Age limits, total file size limit, file count limit, etc. I think its just an implementation of a trend thats wandered into areas it doesnt belong.

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Were I designing the selection page, I would simply make it the catalog, and give every user their own private catalog where they can sort/search their own designs; then give them the ability to easily publish to their public catalog when ready. I would also build in subfolders/compartments and versioning from the beginning, for users with a lot of designs, as well as the ability to share designs and/or folders with other Glowforge users (for when you want to share something but don’t want it to be public and don’t want to ship files around.)

But I’m sure Glowforge’s product folks are all over this already; I suspect what’s there is just a quick-and-dirty placeholder for what will eventually be the catalog.

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Well the concerning part about it is that they just recently had something a little more functional that they replaced with this. It previously had pagination where you could move through pages or pick first/last page, or jump by increments of 10 pages. So the fact that they took the effort to put this in place leaves me wondering

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Great writeup!

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Excellent walk-through! Very clear and concise.

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Thanks for putting this all in one place!

One thing that I think could be helpful is an on-screen (at least PC screen) list of the shortcut keys when you are placing your designs and artwork. That big, grey area next to the photo of the bed would be a good spot.

-------------:boom:

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Nice refresher on the GFUI.

I am with @takitus on having more organization cues in the catalog. I’m swimming around trying to find everything. I’ve got loads of files and it isn’t always easy to see what they are and who remembers all the different iterations of a design that is set for Proofgrade or for my own materials? Simple list would be very useful here. And I spend way too much time digging for old designs.

The interface works and is easy enough for operations, but there are some simple tweaks that I’m waiting on and have suggested.

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Like you, I hope this isn’t the case and what y’all are seeing now is just a “bright idea” they’re trying out and will move on from there. One of the sales points, regarding the cloud-based software, is that you can control your device from basically any smart device with a modern web browser. That becomes a very shallow thing if keeping a good number of designs in the cloud isn’t feasible because of bad UI design. If I end up deleting files after cutting just because I want to keep the number of files available small and easy to search then I’m going to be pretty much shackled to my production computer and re-uploading the designs again and again (over time). For me, I’ve envisioned a personal catalog (directory) with hundreds of designs, each with several different iterations, all of which I will want to go back to on a semi-regular basis.

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Thanks so much for this!
Wish I could play along!
One day… one day…

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While I understand that being able to print from an iPad is a cool trendy thing to talk about, I really hope they’re not sacrificing the laptop/desktop experience because of it. I think most of us are desktop/laptop users here.

The vision of “people will buy a Glowforge and Proofgrade and just print what’s in the catalog from their iPad in their trendy apartment so they can personalize and sell it on Etsy” is great to sell to investors, but I don’t think it’s reality.

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Im hoping they will add that print straight from Illustrator plugin soon. Would be really nice to not have to do the whole dance in between.

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All indications here are that it is desktop oriented with clicks mouse actions and will continue to do so. I did a print last night from an iPad. It works but it isn’t what they are focusing on from what so see. Of course there will be major updates so we’ll see what happens.

I would be curious as to what is the special sauce that is in a design file that makes the operations default. Printing for Inkscape would be sweet but absent that, what can be added.

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I’m with you on being primarily laptop/desktop. That’s where I’ll spend 99% of my time I’m sure. I was just pointing out that a poor directory for saved files actually flies against what was one of their big selling points (i.e., why they thought cloud based was the way to go.) for me I have 3 different computers that will frequently be communicating with my Glowforge. I simply want to be able to keep a lot of my successful files on the server and pull it up from whatever computer I am at. Seems like a good filing/search/sort feature would be necessary for that.

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And the ability to recall prior settings. That’s a key problem, is when you return it sort of returns to its original state of the file. So if you did a bunch of positioning, settings, etc it forgets them (it’s in the hopper) nor can you recall what the settings were to manually redo them.

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Something like F360?

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