To be fair a user figured out how to do it in a very narrow set of environmental parameters. GF needs to be able to say it works reliably for all users (or at least the vast bulk of them) which is a much bigger task.
Well, it works a fair bit better than nothing!
3 Likes
I haven’t tried it yet so I’ll believe you 
That being said, I’d much rather have a way to say “all cuts are x speed and y power in this job”. It would be more useful to me than a custom material settings gizmo.
This illustrates GF’s other major challenge, meeting the needs of a massive user base, from a meticulous user in Ukraine (@ativanvl) to a typography wizard in Austria (@ylene) to a laser savvy veteran maker (@shop) to a renaissance woman (@geek2nurse) to the most patient person in the universe (@jules) to a stubborn doofus with more ideas than sense (me).
There’s a lot more to getting this right than just hurrying up. That being said … GF, come on, hurry up!
5 Likes
I hadn’t heard about OpenGlow before your post. I’m really excited to see Scott’s reverse engineering effort has progressed to this point.
1 Like
Blush Thank you!
All right there in the username, geek 2 nurse. Also, you make f(l)eathers!
(see: Leather Feathers if you don’t know.)
2 Likes
Does it? I was hopeful but it wouldn’t work for me. The settings that I applied did not achieve the same results as me inputting the settings manually. Perhaps it’s been updated. I don’t know. But that was my experience.
My experience with it has been great. I rarely input custom settings anymore. I use far more non-proofgrade than proofgrade, and the plug in has been a real gamechanger for me. Being able to switch between materials quickly like from cardboard for prototyping, and Luan for final, has probably saved me an hour of time, let alone materials cost if I forget to change a setting for a custom material.
While they claim to be working on a lot of the “Behind the scenes” things to improve our glowforge experience, the minor tweaks they are doing don’t really seem to be making as much of an impact as getting to some of the hopper items. I can’t say my Forge is any faster, more accurate or more reliable than when delivered. It does seem to calibrate even if I forget to move the head under the camera.
2 Likes
Yes, they did seem to fix that one bug. One thing I didn’t check is if the bed alignment is any better. It’s possible there’s been improvement there (or maybe not).
But the fact that we don’t know, is another disturbing sign. Lack of communication is usually a sign of an unhealthy company. I would say GF started out with some really awesome communication. The fact that this has apparently changed makes me wonder why. Hopefully I’m being too pessimistic, and any day now GF will cr*p out a huge release with wonders aplenty.
Really not intending this to be rude… but where have you been the last 3 years? While we’ve always had a fair amount of direct interaction with Dan through the forum, the actual level of communication has always been very low. The actual information expressed through those communications has always been low. Information regarding problems they are encountering has always been low.
Now - this isn’t a diss to Glowforge. It’s the way corporate communications are across 99% of companies. Glowforge seems to have adopted both a Kickstarter-representation of an idea with a Corporate mentality re communications.
People backing crowd-sourced projects always seem to think they are investors in the company, and lots of KS-operations give a very transparent view of their processes, problems, etc.
On the flip side, very few corporations give any meaningful data/information to outsiders. You can get some financials through publicly traded companies, but actual meaningful communications is very little. I’ve sat through a ton of investors calls - and the information conveyed in this calls is on par with how Glowforge disseminates information.
2 Likes
Completely disagree. During the initial product launch delay, and the subsequent shipping delays, there was pretty good communication. And if you look back in the announcements, you’ll see we were getting status updates monthly (albeit with pretty minimal software improvements). All that seems to have stopped.
Dan generally does an update when he has something to report. If there’s nothing new, he’ll delay it.
He mentioned a June update, so we’ll probably hear something before the next few weeks are out.
Agree. I predict it will be more announcements about shipping, and nothing about software at all.
Agree with the concerns. I am new here, and am waiting to return my glowforge. I have emailed the company twice now with zero response. This community is awesome, but considering how bad the web app is you would think they would compinsate with stellar communication but its vacant.
Can only add a “me too” voice here, there are so many issues and missing features in the software. Even fixing some small bits would help us all feel a little better.
What’s confusing me is that most of the stuff people complain about should not be that difficult to fix - the fact that it is becomes a worry in it’s own right.
For example, switching inches to millimetres - should be trivial, so why isn’t it done?
Maybe they are brewing up for a big release, but I would say that is an error - the vocal and active community would be happier with regular small releases I think.
3 Likes
How long has it been since your first email? My experience with them has been that there can be an initial delay, but support is actually very good.
That surprises me, because they are usually very quick with their warranty replacements if something is wrong with the machine.
Other than warranty replacements though, they do not accept returns or exchanges, AFAIK. If you have decided you don’t want it after accepting delivery, you always have the option of selling it.
In a past discussion, in which @dan was active, I said something like, “I have to assume they are working on all the things that they promised first, and choosing not to work at all on anything else.” As I recall, @dan replied and said that my assumption was basically correct. He also said somewhere that they all use the machines personally and anything that annoys us likely annoys the staff too.
Assuming that they are exclusively working on promises first, I think that the passage of time has turned that strategy from an understandable annoyance into a serious error. We all know how hard it is to estimate how long a task can take–the company clearly made some of these errors already. Now what if making the passthrough work as promised turns out to take a year longer than expected?
Putting off a metric ruler and other quality-of-life changes for what could be a very long time does not sound like the right move even if you can defend it by pointing out that you’re only working on things you promised. I don’t make the rules, but I would rather my passthrough support was delayed additionally if I got other meaningful changes along the way.
Shortly after I got my Pro, despite the delays, I was very happy and could have recommended the product to a friend. Sure, it wasn’t feature complete, but the ball was rolling! But today, I would not recommend a Glowforge.
I have to accept the possibility that the information blackout and dearth of updates means that there may be no further meaningful updates at all.
The lack of feature updates, bug fixes, and news now makes the company look kind of broken… IMHO. But none of this will be perceptible to anyone browsing the web site or seeing the company at a trade show. Only people who have been in the family a while are going to notice.
Just my two Earth cents.
6 Likes
From the outside, seems they aren’t using agile methodology with short sprints. Or at least they are then waiting to release stuff in one big monolithic release.
2 Likes
Let’s not turn this into an agile thread 
Next up: Linux vs windows!
1 Like