Snapmark work stopped

I understand and appreciate the love for Snapmark. We build the Snapmark experiment as a technology test of features owners have been waiting for for a long time, like precision preview and pro passthrough. We knew it wasn’t for everyone, but we decided we would be able to develop those features more quickly if we tested Snapmarks with some customers to gather more data. Now that we’ve done that, it’s clear that there’s still work remaining.

We decided to that, instead of doing that work, we’d keep our focus on our original commitments. We may revisit Snapmarks in the future as an advanced or premium feature.

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One of the biggest wins with Snapmark is that you didn’t have to worry much about rotation. You could just plop your printed design in and let the Glowforge rotate your design to match the orientation of the piece.

The new calibration feature makes it really easy to position things on an item in terms of location but rotating anything precisely in the Glowforge UI is not easy. So without Snapmarks things are likely to be a little bit askew. :frowning:

Still, Calibration and Passthrough are definitely higher priority items than Snapmarks and will help a lot more people get the most out of Glowforge. I just hope you do come back to Snapmark later!

In the meantime maybe you can have some of your web UI people work on making precise rotation easier. (Maybe some keyboard controls for it?)

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A bit of panic–then whew, Snap Marks NOT going away. I admit I’ve not used them much until this past week–and don’t think there’s any way I could combine printing text and then cutting out a special business card design and get 100% yield with any other process than Snap Marks!

And also excited to try out the camera calibration, as indeed it should be a great benefit. Thanks again Dan & Team for the on-going improvements in this great machine!

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Well that’s neat! I’m gonna have to try that out. It’s nice you’re keeping snap marks on for the folks that already have it. I wish I still had it, but it went away when I had to return my machine. Bad hinge and all that.

I’d like to have the feature back, but I’d rather have a working machine. This new feature sounds pretty great too.

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You know, all your promo videos show pretty much perfect placement… You might not want to make “perfect repeatable placement” an EXTRA COST item… Just saying.

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You apparently missed the Lid Camera Calibration announcement… I got to beta test the calibration and focus features, and with the two of them, I’ve been getting that “pretty much perfect placement” the videos show. :slight_smile:

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Nope. Still leaves me to have to figure out how to square things off, and, I still need to do any rotation of images in the SVG because that’s not at all accurate in the GFUI. So I get to make sure things are square (against an unknown / uncertain frame of reference) or anything I engrave may be diagonal or shifted off the perpendicular/parallel that I’m aiming for…

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Yeah, I hear you on the rotation stuff. I’m hoping something is still forthcoming for that, but meanwhile I’ve been having a ball placing things visually and having them end up EXACTLY where I put them. :slight_smile:

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Oh that’s a shame. I love snapmarks not just because of their accuracy, but it’s fire and forget and I don’t have to do any alignment in the software. Glad it will continue to work though…

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I’m loving that about the ‘set focus’ feature. My caliper hasn’t been touched in a while.

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I’m a little upset that I wont get snapmarks. I’ve got a lot of designs I’m using jigs for right now and I really dont want to mess up a 120 dollar cutting board every time my lid camera displays something other than what I expected.
I’ll live, but it sucks that it can’t be rolled out to everyone as a beta feature with a note saying that the work has stopped on it. I was really banking on using this exact feature in a lot of my work.

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Totally agree. This was something I was really forward to, as it lets you be exact in your graphics application of choice and not have to worry about placement in the UI.

Snapmarks isn’t as high a priority to GF as lid calibration because that will help more people, I get it. But there is a definite need and viable use case for it. An extra charge would be a slap in the eye and give many users a nickel-and-dime impression of this company frankly, but many will pay for it.

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My thoughts exactly. As it is I design all of my stuff in a 12x20 area so it will always load into the UI the same way every time. I’ve made a mark on my crumb tray and a mark on my jigs that I line up so I can make sure my cuts are perfect every time but when I have to remove the crumb tray for larger stuff (like cutting boards) I run into issues.

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I understand what you are saying Dan, but what really sucks is having Snap Marks for a while and depending on it greatly and then having to send your unit in only to permanently lose them.

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If this were the case I would absolutely pay for it. It would suck, but I literally can’t do what I need to do precisely without it.

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Yep, I plan to buy the subscription too. Not that I can’t do what I need to do without it, but it’s a lot easier to use, and i do want them to continue to develop it. (I don’t expect them to give it away for free. They have to pay the salaries of the people who are developing it. If making it a subscription makes it available to us, then so be it.)

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I hear you on the Snapmarks thing (for precise rotational accuracy, they’re the best thing going!) – but for something large like a cutting board where a degree or two of rotation isn’t that much of an issue, I think you’ll find that the new visual placement with calibration + set focus is going to knock your socks off. What you see on the screen is what you get – try it and see!

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I’m joining the chorus to keep snapmarks alive. If you’ve stopped development, how about a way to opt-in to the feature as it exists today, with no expectation of support?

The lid calibration is a huge improvement. I’ve only done a quick test, but it seems good enough for engraving on objects that I can get square to the bed. The image quality is (of course) still better in the center of the bed, which is the hardest place to get something square.

But the place where snapmarks seem* to shine is with reusable jigs and especially with print-and-cut. I haven’t even attempted any print-and-cut projects where alignment mattered. I’ll give it a shot with my newly calibrated camera, but it appears that snapmarks are an order of magnitude better in accuracy, and with a less fussy workflow.

If making it a premium feature is the way forward, I’d be OK with that, but I think it’s a shining example of the benefits of the cloud/OTA software model you’ve built. There are plenty of arguments against that approach, so it would be a shame to lose some of the benefits.

*I say “seems” because I never got snapmarks, so I’m going on what I’ve seen in the forums.

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Snapmarks give you pixel perfect placement so when you do something, remove the piece and then put it back in for the next operation there are no worries. No matter how good they get visual placement my eyes are still the weakest link in the chain.

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Is there any word on if the calibration still works after the crumb tray is removed?

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