The new Glowforge iPhone & iPad app (Beta)

Community Support
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This thread is for discussion of the Glowforge App for iOS we introduced in the April 2018 update.

Support

We’ve been experimenting with this software release on the iPad Mini, iPad Pro, regular iPad, iPhone X, iPhone 6 Plus, and iPhone 4s with iOS 9.3 or later. We’d love to hear if it does or doesn’t work on your device!

On that note, if you find a problem, please let us know what device you’re using. You can download the app here.

What to expect

  • You can view and print all the existing designs on your dashboard.
  • To refresh the dashboard, just pull down.
  • Zoom in and out by pinching the area outside of your design.
  • Select objects by drawing a loop around the objects you want to select; unselect by tapping anywhere outside the group.
  • Use your own photos as artwork - just select an image from your photo library, or take a new one.
  • Trace an image directly from within the app.
  • Share an SVG or JPEG you’ve created in another iOS app directly to the Glowforge app.

Known issues

  • Saved designs are not supported. Each design will open as its original upload, even if it was updated in the web version. Changes will not be saved.
  • Sharing PDFs to the Glowforge app is not available.
  • Some manual settings for bitmaps aren’t available.
  • If a design is not visible in your dashboard, try pulling down to force a refresh, or restarting the app.

Since this is a beta release, our support team can’t handle your questions yet, but please share your feedback and any problems you might find here. We’ll try to keep this updated with new information as it becomes available.

Thanks in advance for helping us make this app better!

9 Likes
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Does anyone know how the share for svg or jpeg works for the app… the only button appearing on my ipad is for loading a picture from my photo album

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Sweet!!

A little Texas sage and hummingbird feeder viewed through Adobe Capture
image

Hmm. Let’s share it.
image

To the Glowforge!
image

Ready to engrave vector!
image

5 Likes
4

You can also go to a saved file in your Dropbox account (probably others as well) and Export the file then choose Open in… then choose Copy to Glowforge from the options listed.

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5

That was the answer for my question. Thanks

6

Looks pretty clean. A few initial comments on the App itself. Will test it later.

  1. The log in fields are a little hard to read with a transparent background with the video playing in the background.
  2. When on the engrave settings page for a project, only buttons for LPI of 10, 35 and 75 are visible.
  3. When importing an image from camera roll, why is the aspect ratio set to square?
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Using iPhone X, selected a project from the dashboard. It defaulted to engrave and the other options were grayed out. I wanted to change it to a cut, but that was not an option. Opened the app on desktop and it defaulted to a cut.

The positive is that when opened on the desktop, it picked up right where I left off from the iPhone.

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Swipe left to get to the other ones. :slightly_smiling_face:

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9

Nice. That was not obvious. Especially since you can scroll down to a bunch of empty space.

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Wait till you get to the twirl rotation! :wink:

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Will an android app be in the makings?

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We heard that eventually there may be, but the problem is too many versions of Android. It’s more fractured.

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It won’t let me log in. Not sure what I am doing wrong. Using the same log in as the forum and my pc.

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Had to reset password now allows log in

15

Got some weird SVG rendering on the app-vs-desktop…

First, in the app:

11327
113271154×865 380 KB

And now in desktop:

diff-interface-render
diff-interface-render1357×736 156 KB

It’s the same file in both cases, but the app version is rendering extra lines in the empty spaces between gear spokes. The file itself comes out of a DXF, so god only knows how horrible it may be on the inside, but the desktop render is the one that is supposed to be correct, and the extra lines do not exist in the original DXF.

I haven’t tried to cut the app version, since I don’t want to waste materials right now.

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It doesn’t render the extra lines in the actual cut though. It’s a display error only. (Might want to test it on some cheap plywood to make sure - just in case I’m wrong.)

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Yeah, right now the app displays any open paths as closed paths. (The extra line is drawn from the end of the path to the start.) But it appears not to affect what’s sent to the machine when you hit print.

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That would be great if it did that with engraves on the desktop. It would solve some problems with people trying to vector engrave open paths.

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Well yes, it probably should close paths in the preview whenever you choose to engrave an open path. Ideally the web preview should always match what is sent to the machine.

But when set to cut or score, the iOS app shouldn’t be closing those paths.

1 Like
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I just tested with tracing from a camera image, and found the manipulation of the engraving very finicky. Two-finger gestures (scale and rotate) only work about 5% of attempts.

Let me know if I can be helpful in reproducing this.

(iPhone X, latest everything as of this post, everything else is fine.)