Monthly Archives: July 2015

Improvements to YouMagine

We’ve been working on improving YouMagine for you. The most obvious improvement is the changes made to the design details page. We made the page easier on the eye and easier to scan through if you’re looking at a design quickly.

You can now also embed YouMagine designs on forums and blogs easily.

We also briefly summarize the licenses for you, please be advised that you should take the time (at least once!) to read through the different licenses to find out which one suits you and what rights you are restricting.

We repositioned the content on the page and changed the order of importance of things on the page. The page should be faster to load and quicker to use for you.

Commenting on models just got easier and you can decide to follow or unfollow activity streams.

We’ve updated our email addresses for them to be more personal for you. Although we continue to send any email to the old emails to us we now will use support (at) youmagine, hello (at) youmagine for support questions and supercomputer (at) youmagine for automated emails. You can always just email joris@youmagine for any and all questions! Also the support emails now get sent to the whole YouMagine team, so even though I will answer your questions all of us will read what you have to say in order to understand what our community’s needs and suggestions are.

Our error messages have become friendlier with a kinder tone. Our 404 page now explains that a community member did nothing wrong and gives them links to the gallery and main page as well as a way for people to report dead links should they wish.

If one of your designs is added to a collection then the notification email will also inform you to which collection this design has been added and which design has been added. This has been requested by a lot of people!

We’ve made the Bill of Materials easier to use and added an explanation of what the bill of materials should look like.

Our automated thank you emails have been changed yet again. We’ve updated the text, subject line and timing as per your suggestions.

We’ve solved some caching issues and solved the sizing of photographs on different devices. We’ve changed the related designs to “other designs” in the same category. This means that for now the other designs should be quite random and lead to serendipity. In future we will make them more logical for you.

We’ve added a list of many 3D printers and also let people link through to a detail page about the printer.

A contributed image by another user can also now be the primary image of your design.

OpenSCAD files are now downloaded instead of displayed as plain text. We’re wondering what you think of this feature since some prefer to copy paste the text into OpenSCAD while others prefer to download the file.

We’ve done research into how to best improve the search and will be doing this in the next sprint, these coming two weeks. Please let us know how to further improve YouMagine! Email joris (at) youmagine.com with any feedback, bugs or ideas.

e-NABLE Steampunk Prosthetic Hand By Jacky Wan on YouMagine

Close up of the steampunk hand

We love working with e-NABLE to help them create functional prosthetic hands using 3D printing. We really encourage anyone who has a printer or CAD skill to help them out. One of the most beautiful and completely totally over the top amazing things to come out of e-NABLE is Jacky Wan’s Steampunk hand.

Steampunk 3D printed prosthetic hand.

Its an amazingly well designed and post processed hand and really shows what you can do with a desktop 3D printer and a lot of finely detailed work in painting and finishing it. You can download, add to, remix or print out this wonderful hand here. This is the same YouMagine community member who made the Ducati bike and light saber.

Close up of the detailing on the 3D print.

WikiMode and Jam released on YouMagine

The Jam Logo

Jam

We’re continuing to improve YouMagine for you and have quashed a lot of bugs in the past two weeks. We’ve also released the alpha version of Jam. We’ve been talking about Distributed Innovation at YouMagine for a while, the idea that people will increasingly use digital manufacturing tools and software to collaborate worldwide on open source projects and businesses. This is a trend that has been occurring gradually over decades but with 3D printing hardware becomes malleable changeable and can be iteratively improved. Agile engineering and product development will increasingly occur and barriers to entry to many industries will be significantly lowered. It is for such a world that we are building YouMagine.

Jam is a key tool for us that will help make 3D design and collaboration more social and interactive. At the moment Jam is the 3D viewer that you can see on YouMagine in the carousel on your model page. Check out any model in the gallery to see that. You can zoom in and out and look at files using it. Gradually however we will add new features to it. Jam is a key piece of infrastructure that the 3D printing world is missing, a tool to with a group of people work collaboratively on 3D printing files. We called it Jam because we’d like it to be a tool that could let you have a Jam session but then for 3D printing, also because Jam is a disparate but delicious mix of things and because we’re in Geldermalsen in the Netherlands where people make a lot of jam (and 3D printers!) Do take it for a spin and give us feedback!

WikiMode

WikiMode

WikiMode is another social design feature. You can in the Edit tab of any uploaded model enable WikiMode. This lets anyone else who is logged in to the site add documents, descriptions, categories, tags, designs and images to your design. WikiMode is a way for groups of people to design things together. The original file can not be deleted by other users.

Bugs & Improvements

We’ve moved our servers to Cloud66 and Digital Ocean, this has increased the response time of the site and lets us serve up your delicious triangles at higher speeds.

We’ve also made a new Postmark account to serve up welcome and other automated emails to you. Some people have responded very positively to our emails, others have been skeptical. We’ll continue to tinker with the emails but do tell us if you hate or love them. You now get an automated email if someone starts to follow you or if you are added to a collection. One of our automated emails was actually generating links to 404’s and this has been fixed as well.

We’ve added images of 3D printers that you can add and now can only pick from a list of printers in your profile to show people which machine(s) you have. For the moment we’ve only added very few printers including the current Printrbot machines, the Ultimakers and the Prusa i2 & i3 (Update: We’ve added an expanded list of printers, for now email joris (at) youmagine.com if you’re printer is not on it. Have no fear we will add many more in the weeks to come its just that there are rather a lot of 3D printers out there and we want to see how we can do this in a manageable way.

Manage your printers in your profile.

There was a bug whereby the message counter for some people indicated that they had a new message but this was not the case. This has been fixed. We also made the drop down in the categories field have one blank option rather than be set default to one of the categories to let people tag and archive things better. We got rid of the “Droste effect” bug whereby you could enter an existential minefield through YouMagine by following yourself.

You can now copy our RSS feed and the social media links at the bottom of the home page have been improved as well. We’ve slightly updated the design of the home page with tweaks and improvements. We made some improvements to our API and the documentation of our API.

We hope you like the changes and keep the feedback coming.

Updates and improvements to YouMagine

Today we migrated to new servers in order to improve our response time for you.

You can now also add videos to your designs to show how your uploaded project works and what it does. We hope that this will especially help those who are making more complex items. We also hope that people will upload build videos to show how things are to be assembled if they require assembly.

We changed the design of our Terms of Service to make them more readable.

Our Notice and Takedown procedure has also become prettier and more readable.

We updated a number of security procedures and security updates to make the site safer to use.

We updated to a new version of Rails.

There was a bug whereby the thumbnails were not displayed next to the search results, this was fixed. We improved the search to show more recent designs.

If a community member ends up on the 404 page then we now display a search window so they can directly search for what they are looking for.

People can now make longer abstracts of their designs and edit them.

We’re working hard to improve the site further, email joris at youmagine.com should you have any feedback, ideas or improvements.

City of the Future designed by Dutch School kids

A model of the city of the future

The Parkschool in Utrecht did a project with all of their classes whereby they got the kids to design the city of the future. The kids then used 3D printers and laser cutters to make a model of this city. Class 7 & 8 designed the model for the city, grade 6 used the lasercutters while grade 5 designed an amusement park. Kids as young as 5 & 6 were involved in making designs for this city of the future. We think that this is a great initiative to teach kids digital fabrication methods as well as get them involved in thinking holistically about the future at a young age. The City of the Future project has been selected by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs for inclusion in their City of the Future project which is wonderful news!

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