Public Backlog i.e. The Hopper

I see lots of posts where Dan and support mention putting items into the Hopper, is there a public backlog the owners can view and track different items that they feel are important? For me, a must-have feature is secure, guaranteed deletion of uploaded files.

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No there is not. No there is no plan to that I’ve seen announced. Dan has specifically said no on the issue.

This idea has been suggested several times, and rightly so, because…

YES it should be. YES let us vote on what’s top priority in the “nice to have” column.

In no way should the priority of actual broken things be compromised of course, but for all the cool ideas and suggestions, were all really interested to know what’s coming.

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Ditto. But it’s not going to happen.

It happens when it happens when they want it to happen.

The hopper is a genetic splicing of a file cabinet and trash can. You will never know which drawer a recommendation is placed. Going in the hopper is like your parent saying “maybe”. 80% will be ignored, 15% investigated, 5% implemented. No company wants a customer to know that their suggestions will be ignored.

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Of course not, but the unspoken contract here (in my eyes) is that GF should tell us maybe if something is an absolutely no go, so we don’t spin our wheels suggesting it over and over.

We give a lot of time and effort on this forum, we’re just asking for a little guidance and for something to look forward to.

I am a huge fan of GF’s product, and as a rule I think they handle customer service and communication very very well – just this particular issue seems like an oversight to me. I mean, sure, armchair quarterback and all, what do I know about the needs of a company like GF… but still it just seems like a miss.

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As a person who has run a hopper a time or two, that is the PERFECT analogy!

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I would think that it would Bea lot about what is easy and what is not I imported a piece that came in too big to fit and had to scale it down, however with even the camera view scaling bigger and smaller I had absolutely no idea of the size of the design. I go in today and there are numbers on the side that at least gives you the size range. Not sure how accurate it is but it is a huge improvement from before and in two days.

What would be nice is just the original weblog that beach time something changes it is dated in the blog like ;
3:30 added scale to top and sides of GFUI

Closest you’re going to get probably is this:

https://community.glowforge.com/search?q=%40dan%20hopper

There is some legality in accepting customer suggestions. Apple does NOT accept customer suggestions from what I remember. If a customer provides a suggestion (that may already be in development) and Apple makes a ton of money off it, it’s possible the customer comes back demanding compensation.

Actually I’m against this. It would mean that the ‘ideas’ would become a popularity contest for users of this forum. I would rather the ideas are managed in a more productive way. I rather get what I need rather than what I want :smiley:

Totally agree which was why I said nice to haves.

In my experience working with large open source projects, backed by highly profitable companies, this is not at all correct. Apple is a different beast altogether, they “know” what you want before you want it. Ideas are a dime a dozen and an individual can only demand compensation if they have the patent for the idea. At the end of the day, a patent suit would be best served through legal channels instead of being demanded on a public ticket tracker.

Individuals contributions, on the other hand, may have a monetary value. This is why anyone that doesn’t work for one of the maintaining companies typically has to sign a release before they are allowed to contribute. One common release form is the Individual Contributor License Agreement which as used by Kubernetes, their CLA, and was originally maintained by Google.

This does happen. Microsoft’s VS Code is one example where it is implemented in a reasonable way by ranking Pull Request reactions on Github. There is no reason that they would need to add upvoting capabilities. The idea is to let us see what has been suggested, what has been definitively rejected, and what is “planned” for the next release or two.

At the end of the day maintaining a public issue tracker doesn’t add that much additional overhead to maintaining a healthy relationship with their community, which they seem to be doing extremely well. If they need help maintaining a public issue tracker I’m sure there are many people, myself included, on these forums that would love to help. Doing so would only make things more transparent and help build additional trust among the community as a whole.

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The competition reads this forum, so GF is not going to tip off the copycats by publicizing their development docket!

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There is a middle ground between telling the world what their next innovative, patentable creation is… and telling us when our pass-though slots will work in the manner already described, or when we can expect to be able to save our own material settings.

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We already know about all the features that have been advertised/promised so there’s no reason to keep talking about them - they will make it in at some point. Any other feature development had better take priority after the advertised features are done, so until that happens, there’s no point fussing over them either.

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Well, they advertised some stuff that may be better deprioritized, imho. Would you rather they developed image recognition for Macbooks before they implemented any of the hundred other features we’ve talked about, like saving settings? Or fixed outstanding bugs, some of which can cause you to waste materials?

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It’s quite the opposite - nothing is impossible; if it keeps coming up over and over, it may move from “we thought we’d never do that” to “well, let’s take a look”.

Note that what makes us reconsider is a wide variety of people requesting something unprompted, spread over a long period of time. “Campaigns” to get attention to a feature get much less weight - if it’s a real problem, we hear about it in individual support requests from people who are unaffiliated with each other, constantly, for months.

A great example is auto-save. We designed the UI to be like a print preview, so saving did not fit. But a nonstop stream of different people posted to Problems & Support and wrote in to support requesting it, we took a “we think we won’t do that” and did it.

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