Author Archives: Wilco Niessen

About Wilco Niessen

Lead Ruby on Rails Software Writer for YouMagine

Searchbar Improvements

Dear Community,

We’re continuing to improve YouMagine for you based on your feedback.

The main improvement is that the search field is now permanent visible in the navigation bar.

The new design button is now reduced to just a “Plus” sign. Also to make room in the navigation bar your name is not shown anymore, but the “Profile” icon is.

Also for you keyboard users: You can now press the question mark key to quickly go to the search field. Also when on the design page you can easilty navigate between the images by pressing the left and right arrow keys.

We also improved the performance and fixed some bugs.

We hope you do enjoy the new release and please let us know what you think.

The YouMagine team

New Release of YouMagine

We’ve been getting lots of feedback lately from community members. We really love that you guys are participating and aiding our development. Keep your suggestions and ideas coming! Also, if you have any complaints or find any bugs, please do let us know as well.

You can now see who is following you.

We’ve done a big new release today that will improve YouMagine.

Today will bring a huge performance and speed improvement because of caching, smart reloading and indexing.
The site should feel more responsive and faster.
Searching now really finds something. We’ve been very unhappy with our site search and have improved it.
You can now search for designs based on their name or description. This is only the first implementation of a faster search, but in the future it will really get much better still.

Improved Search Results on YouMagine

The YouMagine site is now responsive on mobile devices. Initially the site would not display well on mobile and we’ve now solved this.
We’ve added “Collections” where you can add designs to a collection, e.g. “Things to print” or “Architectural Things I Find Beautiful.
The “Designer” pages now have nice stats.
You can upload a zip file and choose “Expand” and it will extract the file for you adding its contents as documents.
We’ve also made some layout changes such as to the the footer.
We’ve also added a button to upload your documents faster.
You can now see who is following you and keep in touch with them.
You can now on your profile fill in your skill set.
We’ve had quite a few complaints about registering with GitHub accounts. This functionality was broken. We’ve fixed it and now logging in with Github & Facebook works again. Sorry about this.
You can also resend a confirmation e-mail should you not have received it.
Additionally we’ve made some small bug fixes.

Resend Confirmation Email.

We’re working on improving the site and may be adding to our team soon. We hope you like the improvements! Please do keep giving your feedback, this is important to us.

Being discussed is clearer we think for users.

Introducing the YouMagine Team: Wilco

Wilco

Hi, I’m Wilco, a software developer using a lot of tools but mainly working with Ruby on Rails. While working at YouMagine I’ve really developed an interest in 3D printing. I’ve heard the news about printed skulls, beautiful art, parts for hobby trains and a lot more. Now it’s possible to really create something, the only limitation is your own creativity. And that’s cool! I love that at the office I can hear machines printing beautiful designs all day.I think that by using my skills in Ruby on Rails, web development and a lot more I can help create and maintain a kick-ass community like YouMagine. RoR enables us to really make coolstuff quickly available for you guys. And when we make a mistake (and we do) we can easily fix it. So, I’m creative in my skills and you guys are really creative in 3D modeling, sharing and a lot more.

So what’s the future of 3D printing? Well I think it’s HUGE! It’s beyond our imagination. Now we buy stuff from the Internet, tomorrow we will print stuff and instantly use it. Everyone can develop their own creativity by using digital tools to make real things. I really like the things 3D printing is doing in the medical field. Now it’s too expensive to make a custom hand or foot, in the future you will just print one. It’s unbelievable.

“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine, and at last, you create what you will” – George Bernard Shaw

Tech update: Improvements to YouMagine R1.2

Hi!

Last week we enjoyed working on and improving YouMagine. This is what we did:

Carousel working again for latest Chrome (the 3D viewer still broken, working on it!)
Performance upgrades
Extended support for external editors / 3D tools. We started with OpenJSCAD, but more tools will follow. If you upload a .jscad file people will be able to press edit and tinker with or adjust your design:

Some small fixes in the navigation bar

We have added support for the following licences:

Creative Commons – Public Domain Dedication
Creative Commons – Attribution
GNU – LGPL
BSD License

Clicking favorite/download will update the counters without a page reload!

Some small bug fixes

We will continue introducing cool new features and performance upgrades so you can do what you do best: Inspire, Create, Share and Make!

In the meantime, if you encounter problems or have suggestions, let us know! We like to hear from you!

Wilco & the rest of the YouMagine team

Tech update: Improvements to YouMagine R1.1

Hi!

Today we released some new exciting features and fixed some bugs!

We introduced the YouMagine blog! Which you seem to have found! There’s a link in the header:

And now we have a nice large green “Publish” button to publish your cool designs! A cool large publish button!

You can change your profile without entering your password again (yeah, we didn’t like that either)

You can now Follow users and find their designs on the front page!

You can now see which followers someone has.

We added nice icons in the tabs on the profile pages:

The favorites of a person are also shown on the Profile page.

Registration now includes a very easy question to make sure you are human (ehhh, the number is 21). Don’t get me wrong, we like robots in general, we just don’t like the spammy types. FYI: for friendly robots, we have the APIs!

There’s now a Top designers section! If you get lots of favorites on most of your designs, that will bring you into the top designer section!

We made some speed improvements, more caching and other speed upgrades.

We hope you like our new features and improvements so that we can make your experience on YouMagine the best there is!

We’re also looking for those of you who want to be even more involved. If you’d like to become a beta tester you can do so here:

https://next.youmagine.com/

Username: beta

Password: tester

This will give you access to our beta testing sandbox. You will have to register with a separate account, since it’s a sandbox. Make a new account there in order to test. Please note that the data on next.youmagine.com gets deleted periodically. On next, you will get to see lots of new features and be able to directly influence the future of YouMagine.