Definitely. How very interesting you read it that way when the entire post was written to help.
“It is what it is” simply means “We don’t work for Glowforge so we have no way to judge if the time it takes to do {something} is fast, slow, or average.” Until told otherwise, it simply is what it is. One could compare and say “It takes longer to do {something} with Glowforge than it does with {some_other_laser}.” but that wasn’t what I was presented with.
“stop thinking of the GFUI as anything more than a print driver” is clearly out of its context. That context being “IMHO” which, in case you’re unaware, means “In my HUMBLE OPINION.”
“they have 0 intention of going that direction… ever” you’ve gone ahead and taken out of context again. That context was “To the best of my understanding.” Nothing harsh about that. Simply providing information as I know it. If you know something to the contrary, I’m always happy to hear it.
I like to provide answers simply, briefly, and concisely where possible. I suppose some could take that as curt. @hvalross I hope you’re not one who did.
I hope you know there’s no contempt or malice in that statement! It’s simply easier for me to think of it that way! In fact, I mostly like the software. Definitely feels… rough around the edges.
Some things are intuitive, some just aren’t but you get used to them. I don’t think GUIs should require much “getting used to.” They should always be intuitive. Examples… Having a gear icon, which, I think, most people would intuit to be “Settings”, is an odd button that brings up a single-item “menu” to refresh the bed image. First of all, a menu of 1 seems silly to me. Seems like one would make a “Refresh Bed Image” button that, of course, looks like a camera. A weird ellipses button that brings up instructions. I think a common symbol for that would simply be a lower-case “i” representing “info.” The undo/redo buttons look, to me, more like Rotate buttons since typically undo/redo are straight arrows, not curved like rotate buttons.
Anyway… There y’are. One of the best printer drivers I’ve ever used.
I think Glowforge should focus on giving us the tools only they can provide. Drawing lines and ovals? Helpful, but we can draw lines and ovals with any number of programs. Rotating designs to match how the material has been placed in the machine? That’s something that the Glowforge software is in a unique position to facilitate.
CAM/glorified print driver nearly first, drawring program nearly last. First should be don’t crash. Also, the ability to save should come before the CAM stuff.
The odd crash is to be expected in beta software but when the same reproducible crashes don’t get fixed for months that is strange, particularly when it wastes material and time.
When I was a professional programmer if the products I worked on crashed reproducibly I would generally fix it the same day, then pass it to the test department and it would be available for customers to download within a few days. The customers, who paid a similar amount for our products, would expect nothing less.
I’m no developer, but I imagine cloud-based makes that a bit harder since there are considerably more variables in play. Browser brand, browser version, computer OS brand, computer OS version, ad/popup blockers, antivirus, malware on the machine, any number of things at the host, etc. etc. etc. I can only imagine how that makes issue resolution a lengthy process. Of course, I’m sure Glowforge would like to get to your level of resolution time.
Some bugs certainly could be but for example starting the next print too early causing a lock up doesn’t seem like anything related to browsers or OS. Seems like the cloud to machine protocol can’t handle the machine being busy and / or the GUI doesn’t check the machine state is fully ready before it allows a new job to be started.
This has been the case for a very long time. Looks like they have nobody working on it for at least six months.
Plus how long have people being requesting saved state? How hard is it to save the size, position and rotation of a bunch of onscreen objects? How hard to display those in the text boxes when an item is selected?
I can tell you not hard at all and not something that would take more than a day or two.
That presumes somebody is working on those things. I suspect Glowforge has employed qualified people. Therefore I must believe they have worked, and are working, on more important things.
There may be factors unknown to us which make things hard that appear to be easy. I can think of many such examples from my own career in software. The fact that in each case I said some variation of “We can’t do that? Are you $#^&#@ kidding me?!” didn’t change the reality.
There may also be a wide philosophical gap between any given user and whoever owns the design of the software, and unless they announce the details of that philosophy we’ll continue to go around in circles in the forum.
Like @Tom_A said, I have to believe they are working on the most important things currently, I just hope I’d agree with the list!
I want all kinds of new features too, but first I guess I want my Pro to arrive.
As a new owner (working on learning for about 2 weeks)
These are the two main issues I see. These drive me crazy.
Save state - GF should be able to save designs in progress in their exact placement
Especially for non-PG media, we really need to be able to save a “prepared file” with the settings so that we can run it again and again without having to put the engrave/cut settings back in every time. Huge time waster.
Software hanging. I’ve had several cases where a large engrave, or even a simple cut, will have the software freeze in “Scanning your material” or “preparing your design.”
This seems to happen more with non-PG items.
I would love to use only PG items but the selection is so limited right now. I’m not using them at all and having to experiment with settings.
I am an owner of the X-Carve and the Glowforge as well as a smaller desktop laser. I share some of the same issues as described in the forum (can’t trust the camera alignment, etc.). I like the fact that you set the zero on the mini-laser and the X-Carve. (The mini-laser even flashes the laser for a second to show you.) It instills confidence that my work is centered and that my design will cut either starting at my zero point or around it.
Maybe the software developers of Easel (for X-Carve) can work with Glowforge.
You can in effect do this by running an operation with very low power settings, so you can watch the head (and laser dot) run around the object to confirm placement, without actually affecting the material. Yeah, it’d be a great feature to have the GF do that automatically.
I do this all the time but it requires some extra steps. Even on max speed and min power, the laser can make it through the masking and mark the work piece, especially at corners. I often put down extra masking layers to prevent this, but then I have to peel them off without disturbing placement.
I haven’t had that problem. Using 582u masking, power 1 only marks the masking lightly.
One nice feature in the software for my universal at work is that you can drag a marker in the software preview (using the focus marker) and it will move he laser head to that location and trigger the focus beam so you can see where that spot in the preview will land on the material.
