Please let us permanently include settings in the SVG file or in the User Interface

Everything Else
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The “save design” feature is so close, but so far.

Please give us the feature in the UI where we save standard colour = setting options that are permanent for all designs.

Or, if we can’t have that, ff we could add in the SVG metadata section a simple Colour = This Setting - much as is already being done in the Save Design already this would make things so much better.

Having had a bad day yesterday and wrongly cut several different materials on different designs this is so frustrating.

Yes, I know I could do this by saving each design from the GF and use that. But that’s just making me wrestle with the UI instead of it working for me. And of course the saved design SVG does not look like the original SVG.

Yes, I know I could call up the last cut of this file, but that is no use when you are working through iterations of a design - or where you have a standard design that you personalise each time.

I know people are going to say “I don’t work like that” - well fine, like a lot of other features - don’t use it.

I’ve also been trying to reverse engineer the “save design” settings, but (a) it seems to have been done in the most bizarre way possible (i.e. it doesn’t do the simple thing of saving the colour = setting, instead it sets up this complicated class to setting arrangement which seems needlessly complicated).

The really frustrating thing is the “save design” feature is so nearly right, but misses the point.

Having to enter the settings every time is (a) tedious and (b) error prone.

A standardised colour scheme to settings would also help exchanging design files as the settings would be consistent.

And pretty much every other laser system does this as far as I can tell.

So, please, please, please can we push this to the top of hopper?

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I set my settings by material and not by the design as I might use the same design on several different woods and acrylic.

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And I wouldn’t for a minute suggest you couldn’t override the default settings. So you might prep it using draftboard and then override the settings for your final cut on acrylic say.

Though, since I suspect most settings would be proofgrade cut/score/engrave/etc then changing the material should follow.

I would also suspect that most designs are made for a particular material.

But again, you should still be allowed to override - just as you can now.

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Give me a feature like this I would use 99% of all cuts over a jigsaw or stamp which I might use once a month at most.

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This is just my acrylic settings.

acrtlic
acrtlic382×825 20.6 KB

perhaps cut settings are a better explanation
cut settings
cut settings378×824 19.1 KB

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Sure, I’ve got a lot of specials too - but that doesn’t change my view. For most people, most of their designs are cut to the same settings.

GF will know - it will be in their logs.

There is a reason this has been standard on software like Lightburn for donkeys years - because it’s jolly useful. Does it cover all use cases, of course not. Does it cover most use cases - I bet it does.

The whole point of Proofgrade - and indeed the Glowforge ethos - is make it easy. This would make things a lot easier for most people in most cases - and still be way more useful than jigsaw mode.

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Those aren’t “Special” but just my go-to. I have a lot of different effects I want for acrylic so that is the reason for it. I should probably clean out the ones I am not likely to use. If it is one off special I am not likely to save it.

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Not to get off topic - but that 's another issue - being able to manage material settings - especially grouping them.

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Alphabetical works for me with most important word first.

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Eh, I think this is way over generalising. Personally, I have never used ‘save design’ and can’t imagine a scenario where I would. I’d also never presume that how I use GF represents most people. There’s so much variety displayed just in this forum - I’d bet $$ GF has analayzed their data vs. Resources vs. their secret sauce software system to decide the development roadmap. I mean, we still don’t even have folders for designs.

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11

I agree, “save design” is a great idea in theory but doesn’t really work because it’s implemented the wrong answer for people who do their own design work in inkscape, illustrator etc.

It does work if you design solely in the UI, but then I’m not sure what the point of it is because you would have the design and settings already saved in your dashboard.

I don’t believe that GF have done anything of the sort regarding resources vs improvements. I say this because over the years since the GF was actually released to users there have been hundreds of ideas - many of which are trivial to resolve in development time - that have never made the light of day.

For example this specific request of mine has come up many times over the years, but I have never seen anyone ask for a jigsaw making tool in the UI. Especially since there are already lots of jigsaw tools in inkscape, illustrator and on the web.

I do think there are some assumptions that GF made about how the GF is used that are based on the launch and pre-launch usage. Whereas now it is a different kind of tool and a different kind of usage.

There are definitely two camps of users, the “crafters” who make one-offs and the “producers” who make and sell many repeatedly.

I would love it if GF put out the “ideas hopper” list and actually got some feedback on what people wanted.

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Because non-grandfathered and non- premium accounts now only save a a certain amount of recent designs.

There have been a lot of backseat developers … The simple fact is that none of us actually know what is trivial to GF or not. It’s all speculation.

This is operating on another false dataset to support a personal belief/wish. I’ve never seen a wild California condor but that doesn’t matter to the condor at all.
They’ve stated that the vast majority of support inquiries come in by email - that we’re not privy to. Could thousands of private messages asking for a puzzle tool exist? Maybe, maybe not. But we don’t know.

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(Massive caveat, I’m just a rando on the Internet with no visibility into what is happening behind the scenes. However when has that ever stopped internet randoes from Having Opinions?!)

So, neither have I… but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t being asked for either directly or indirectly.

My guess is that they’re aiming this at people who want to get into lasering but believe they can’t handle the design aspects. It seems like the exact sort of thing you’d want to feature in your advertisement, especially to entice new users from market segments that may have been slightly too intimidated to jump in.

If I’m right there’s an ethical question to be asked here — take these points/assumptions:

  • If (in theory) subscription dollars were used to fund this dev
  • Subscriptions were pushed as a way for them to develop the things that we wanted for so long
  • that this feature (and others) was chosen specifically to entice new users instead of addressing existing users’ needs

… then it begs the question of whether or not Glowforge has a duty to prioritize existing customers‘ needs and/or allow us to participate in the prioritization process as new initiatives are chosen.

It’s pretty clear what Glowforge thinks here, they have long kept the “hopper” secret and refuse to discuss future development plans. Further in the earliest stages of the subscription model this concept of accountability and visibility for subscribers was discussed and it was given a pretty firm “Nope” from GF.

Anyway. I’ve seen too many indications that Dan is a thoughtful leader to believe that there’s no software/hardware roadmap, but it just feels like nobody’s at the wheel sometimes.

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I don’t know what donkey years are but Lightburn came out as a response to GF (someone who pre-ordered and didn’t want to wait through the delays) so I don’t know if that’s the best example. :slight_smile:

That said - color mapping has been the standard for years and years. It’s both a negative that it imposes design constraints, and also a positive that it imposes design constraints, IMO.

Personally, I feel like it goes against the core mantra of Glowforge in the sense of just make it and go, out of the box. You don’t have to worry about a 255,0,0 RGB red to make it recognize as a cut, or even more constraining : recognize the path. Not to mention stroke thicknesses.

Perhaps a nice compromise might be to have a default palette that you can map but still have the flexibility to recognize all colors, so manual assignment is still easy. But I think that would involve a fair amount of work to the actual app infrastructure. You’d have to have the material manager be different and more organized - not just saving custom settings that you can name, but being able to create custom materials that have the different job parameters stored.

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15

A parseable text block in a predefined format. I really don’t know why this hasn’t been done, it would be so simple compared to the other strategies I’ve seen.

It’d be so easy to immediately determine whether or not your text defs have errors and alert the user.

Of course all of this presupposes that Glowforge isn’t an absolute dumpster fire of technical debt and bad architecture… and also assumes (probablynincorrectly) that Glowforge has any real interest in anything that doesn’t drive new sales of machines or proofgrade.

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Yes this, “save design” was so close to this, but went off somewhere weird and unnecessary. That simple thing of assigning colour via parseable text is 99% of what save design does but then they threw in other stuff that completely broke it and stopped it being usable as an interchange format.

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Absolutely. And it feels like between the UI and the Save Design it is 90% there already.

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butterfast?

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Not sure I understand, but it sounds like you are asking for (eg) RED to always cut and BLUE to always score and GREEN to always engrave, etc. (or whatever colors). The main problem I see is what about people who can’t use those colors? Like R/G colorblindness or whatever reason. I guess it would be different if the colors could be user defined, but otherwise, I don’t like it.

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it’s actually quite standard for red to be cut, blue to be score, and black to be engrave. i know that’s the standard on Universal (you can change it in the interface). and i’m pretty sure other major manufacturers are similar.

the deeper issue here for GF is that the GFUI uses multiple colors for multiple operations. so picking 3 standard really only covers very basic cutting. so if someone sets up 20 operations, we need 20 colors.

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