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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.