What's going on with the web app

Well, in all fairness, every company has screw-ups in the laptop space. But I was more thinking about iPad and iPhone.

If you watch the whole video he points out design problems in those as well.

Ok, apologies that I’m not able to watch it at this moment (am at work), but I just realized this video is the infamous Louis Rossmann rant. This man makes his living repairing hardware. Apple really is hostile towards third parties repairing their hardware.

Like most computer manufacturers, their policy is to troubleshoot the assembly that’s not working, and then replace the whole assembly. I had an ASUS laptop, for example, that had a bad video connector. They replaced the entire mainboard rather than try and replace or reflow the connector. That’s just the way it works - they feel it’s more economical for them to do that, than to try and repair at a finer grained level. Also, designing hardware for maintenance like that comes with some compromises. And finally, I think Apple has a bit of planned obsolescence in mind.

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That’s pathetic (not your comment, but the fact that it’s a thing). I hate change for change’s sake, but you’re completely right that some people need it. Obviously if you have features you’ve promised, I expect that you’ll work toward them, but otherwise I just like things to stay as they are. Not all change is good.

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I see GF has updated the “Careers” page on their website. Looks like a great place to work, and I hope this helps them attract some talent.

Well with got our June update, but unfortunately (as predicted) no new features - Just some tweaks to the engrave settings.

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I’m kind of excited to try the new engrave settings. :slight_smile:

The catalog is stagnant. The free designs we were promised as a consolation of one of the delays are still not there. The features that were originally promised are nowhere in sight. Alignment and passthrough may never improve. There is no phone support. I am not sure what is occupying the time of the developers and creatives on their staff.

I like my GF but I am sadly disappointed in the performance of the company.

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Well, you know it’s nothing you couldn’t have done by manually entering settings.

Yeah, and actually, I probably could’ve built myself a laser cutter, too. But I opted to let someone else do it for me. Sometimes it’s nice to get to the end product without having to sweat through all the in-between stuff.

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I appreciate your viewpoint, but that’s really not a good analogy. Building a laser cutter is a lot more complex than going into the UI and keying in a power level and speed - and that’s really all it is. Anyone whose done any significant amount of engraving has already worked out their own settings, anyway. In many cases, the settings have to be tweaked for the particular image you’re engraving, so a default one-size-fits-all value isn’t all that useful.

I really think that you’re projecting your own methodologies, workflows, etc. onto everyone else here. Not everyone works the same as everyone else. This is just pulling numbers out of the air, but my observation from reading here, the Facebook group, etc. is that the majority of people just want to hit print and get good results.

Addendum: I find it much easier to edit my source image to get the engrave result that I want versus infinitely tweaking the engrave settings.

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You can try all day to invalidate my appreciation, but it’s not gonna work.

I’m super happy with my GF and I’m willing to wait for however long it takes @dan & co. to turn out a quality product rather than trying to rush stuff to us to satisfy the complainers. I spent a few years in software dev working for people who had no concept of what they were asking for, zero capacity for delayed gratification, and couldn’t comprehend my meaning when I told them they didn’t pay us enough to write sloppy code. Quality takes time. And I appreciate quality, the effort it requires to achieve it, and developers who value their pride in their work over profit, and refuse to lower their standards .

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Maybe you haven’t done any photo engraving? It’s very unlikely that you are going to upload a photo, hit “print” and get good results. Certainly the 15 second change that Glowforge made to tweak the photo engrave settings isn’t going to change that.

I have no idea what you’re talking about. I really don’t care what your opinion is, TBH. But you chose to come on my thread and post some misleading information, so I feel obligated to correct the record.

I can absolutely, 100% guarantee you that I have more experience in software development than you. And the pace of improvements to the GF app is neither typical nor acceptable. It’s great that you are happy sitting around waiting months and months for improvements that never come. In that case, feel free to exit my thread and go post happy thoughts elsewhere. But many of us want the features we were promised before we placed our order, and each month that goes by with literally zero code changes increases the concern that we bought into a dead ecosystem.

I’ve done a fair number of them on a fair number of different materials.

If you want to set up material benchmark after benchmark to figure out that 400 speed and 92 power works better for your image than 405 speed and 93 power, I say go for it. I don’t think those look very good on someone’s wall though.

I personally find that editing an image appropriately yields far better results than trying to find some perfect settings for each and every image.

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I agree that image editing is more important. My point was just that is not a one click thing, and typically requires some fiddling to get optimal results. I’m interested to read Glowforge’s Photoshop tutorial. Have you read it yet?

I said I am excited to try the new engrave settings, could build a laser cutter if I wanted to, and that I’m happy with my GF and kind of lazy.

Which part of that do you consider misleading? My feelings are subjective but really not open to dispute. That leaves my statement that I could have built a laser cutter. I admit I’d have to relearn a lot of stuff to do it, but I could if I wanted to, so I don’t consider that misleading. Wanna see a scan of my engineering degree?

Also, I didn’t realize it was YOUR thread and not open to comments. You seemed okay with other people posting on it.

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You’re pretty confident, for someone who knows nothing about me. Except, I suppose, that I’m a girl. You wouldn’t be the first to underestimate me because of that. :slight_smile: But that’s okay, I’ll concede the superiority of your experience. I don’t, however, appreciate being called a liar, and that’s what you have done by characterizing my statements as “misleading.”

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Your follow-up comment (not your first post) implies that tiny little configuration change that GF made is going to make a substantive difference to people doing engraves. I think that’s misleading. Sure, it corrects some horribly bad settings that they had previously, but it isn’t going to result in magical, one-click awesome engraves in the vast majority of cases. More interesting to me are the docs they provided (which i admit I have not looked at yet), describing a process to use to modify your images to get better results.

LOL, I have multiple engineering degrees. I didn’t bring it up to belittle you. I brought it up because you made a post like you were some sort of authority on what is a normal and acceptable pace for software development. Many, perhaps most, people here are not engineers, and don’t realize that GF is not updating their software at a pace that any company with a healthy software development org would. So they are either struggling (my theory), or they have their entire engineering org working on something else (see the theory posted by Scott above).

A GF user was able to put together some Javascript add-on that adds missing features that many of us have been asking for since day 1. He did this with no access to GF source code or documentation, with a few days of work in his spare time. Now why can’t GF do that?