Just received the GF yesterday. Love it. It’s awesome. But one weird thing. I thought cardboard was a pretty standard material to use in a lasercutter. In fact the GF marketing video from 2015 that prompted me to buy a GF has a giant cardboard globe shown. So imagine my surprise when the app shows me a search dialog with tons of materials, that somehow cardboard is omitted.
Before you reply with:
“But there is no proofgrade cardboard, and for unstandard materials, there is not even a single standard cardboard”.
Yes. Correct. BUT. You could offer up a few different common cardboards: like “0.01inch non-corrugated cardboard”, and perhaps a few Corrugated Cardboard options too… offer several different thicknesses (or let me type it in). For fun could include paper, tissue paper, different leaves… let’s make this database DIVERSE…
"But you’ll always want to tweak the power setting"
ok… fine. so give me a starting point, and make it clear that it’s a starting point that I should experiment, and let me save a preset for it for next time.
What’s a crappy user experience is me getting nothing from the search dialog, then having to go to the GF forums, searching for cardboard, finding OLD speed/power settings (for an old version of the app), then finding the NEW speed/power settings. YUK. That’s a weird user experience - when everything else about the GF experience was AWESOME out of the box.
"But cardboard is flammable, and not recommended"
really. really? in your marketing video, there’s a globe made from cardboard. It’s common. Everyone who does lasercutting uses it. Let’s stop this attitude.
The way you deal with this, is you pop up a huge scary warning, with pictures of flames, and tell the person to watch carefully. Hell my draft board flared up when I cut on top of some places I previously scored - so fire’s gonna happen.
"But we want to recommend people only buy proofgrade…"
Yes, the business model of selling ink cartridges for printers is a known one. It’s going to carry you far, GF people, But I think I’ll still be buying your proofgrade even if I’m doing little hobbies on cardboard and paper. Dont worry, you’ll get my money. And moreover… hmmm. sell me some cardboard and other paper products in your proofgrade store. I’ll buy stacks of it!
Just saying, for user experience. It was a strange one to see tons of materials in the list, and then the most basic common material just wasn’t in there. Would love to see various thicknesses of cardboards, papers, etc… for unsupported materials. As well as in the proofgrade store.