Category Archives: YouMagine Upgrade Released

A new phase for YouMagine

The short version:
We’re looking for people to help out, taking YouMagine into the next phase. To support its continued development, we’ll experiment with various revenue models, including advertising and our just launched Patreon page.

Longer version:
Back in 2013, together with a small team at Ultimaker, we launched YouMagine. The dream was to create a place for people to share and find digital designs for making real objects. Thanks to the amazing Ultimaker and broader 3D printing community, today there are close to 20 000 designs shared on YouMagine, and many more produced objects used by people across the world! This would’ve been impossible without so many amazing contributors!

One of the goals was to create a platform and community that was technology neutral, e.g. not exclusive to customers of Ultimaker. Everyone should feel welcome to use it and contribute to it. In 2017 this was taken a step further. There was no need for Ultimaker to “own” YouMagine, because it considered it a free service to the general public anyway. Ultimaker as the single “sponsor”, didn’t make sense. That’s why Martijn Elserman and I (co-founders of Ultimaker) decided to give YouMagine true independence. As of 2017 it is no longer affiliated with any manufacturer.

For the next 5 years YouMagine was run by me and sponsored by Martijn and myself. During COVID, we invested heavily in making the website more robust to handle the heavy traffic and we improved features for collaboration. For instance, we added file version numbers and better ways to attribute original designers. We got the support of Luis Cordoba, an amazing designer who’s helping to moderate the site. Luis was full of interesting ideas and we realized YouMagine wasn’t given the attention and funding that it deserves. We always figured YouMagine should evolve and stand on its own feet, also financially.

This is why we’re opening up YouMagine for more people and organizations to sponsor it. It should do more than cover the hosting and maintenance cost. We’d love to see experimentation and evolutions of the platform. If you or your organization would like to play a role in this, please reach out!

While I still deeply care about the fate of the platform, my passion for creating new concepts and businesses has taken me to new adventures and a new eco-startup: Stekker.app. Because it takes dedication, focus, perseverance and passion to turn ideas into something of value, I can no longer give YouMagine what it deserves. I will continue to be a sponsor of the platform for as long as needed, but I’m looking for a new “steward” with the passion to take YouMagine to the next level! If you’re that person, please reach out! YouMagine has remained the same for too long, even though there’s so much potential value left untapped.

As of today, we’re starting to experiment with advertising on YouMagine. We also launched a Patreon page, that you can find here. If we end up getting enough income, there’s no need for advertising, which is personally my preference. But it’s up to the next steward(s) to figure out something more appropriate that works well. Whether from advertising or another source, the plan is to let revenues (after costs) go to those who contribute to the platform.

Note: for now, if you’re signed in to the website, you won’t see any ads. So it should be easy to not see them if you’re an active user of the website.

We believe in an exciting future for YouMagine and we welcome you to be part of it!

Erik de Bruijn

Founder and current steward of YouMagine

New release at YouMagine

Our developers Wilco & Martijn continue to improve YouMagine according to your feedback. They’ve made some small bugfixes and design tweaks. Please do keep your feedback and suggestions coming. Additionally YouMagine has been improved so that:

When you hover and hold your mouse cursor over a design, more images will appear.
The counting of Favorites has now been improved, it will now show how many times a design has been favorited.
You can now change and delete an “I printed this design” image.
The RSS feed now includes Images (thank you Lawrence for the suggestion!)
The site search has been improved.
Increased the stability and performance of YouMagine.
The site now loads faster and feels more responsive.
The images are now “vanity loaded”: the page is loaded first and then visible images are loaded. After that other images are preloaded.
We now have breadcrumbs on the top of the page so you can easily navigate through the site.
Pic Unrelated

Creative Commons Attribution by Ben Sale, image of a Rosy Footman (Miltochrista miniata) moth.

New Improvements to YouMagine

Dear Community,

We’re continuing to improve YouMagine for you based on your feedback. We are sorry to have to report that over the past weeks we had two uptime issues relating to our server architecture. This problem should be resolved shortly and we’re sorry to have been unavailable for some of our Community. On the upside we’ve improved the overall performance of the site. YouMagine is now faster than before. File upload is now also quicker and more stable. We’ve also upgraded to Rails 4 and fixed some bugs across the site. One of the most requested improvements was to fix the aspect ratio of the images. We’ve improved this so the images are no longer cropped on the design pages. We hope that you enjoy the changes and really would like to have your feedback on further improvements!

Improving YouMagine, new releases

We’ve been listening to your feedback and ideas and incorporating them into YouMagine. If you would wish to have any new features please just email joris (at) youmagine.com and we will look at implementing them. We really do intently listen and try to be as responsive as possible in implementing your suggestions and ideas. We often build features because of direct user requests and encourage you to keep the helpful feedback coming. We’re still growing quickly and hope to expand the functionality of the site considerably. We really want to be the nicest, best & easiest place for you to share and remix your files so please hold us to that standard.

UltiViewer

We’re proud to say that Mark Moissette is now part of the YouMagine team as web application engineer! We’ll introduce him to you soon. We’ve reintroduced the UltiViewer, the 3D preview tool for inspecting models. It has been greatly enhanced! It should be more stable and more modular, so we can create extensions and improvements more quickly.

One cool feature that’s coming up is annotations, you can point out specific points on a 3D model and comment on that. Also, you can add measurements between various points on the surface of a model, e.g. to check certain tolerances. Want to show what the thickness of a particular wall is? Annotations are a way to do this.

Improved Search

After releasing the improved search we went on to make it even better! Being able to easily find what you’re looking for is important.

The search results will have a better ranking (popularity of items are taken into account).
Will also include items with matching tags.
It will have typeahead search, during typing you will already see search results appear! You’ll even see little preview images of the items.
Search will also become permanently visible in the top navigation bar (in the release after the upcoming one).
We fixed several bugs! If you were on page 10 of a design listing, searching for a design resulted in 0 results because it would display page 10 of the results.

Sign in with Google

Alternative versions

More formats will now have (3D) and rendered previews!
Also, it will automatically create STLs if it’s not already an STL file. We now automatically create STL files when an SCAD, JSCAD, OBJ, DAE, OFF, 3DS or PLY file is uploaded. This means that you don’t need to generate that STL export for your SCAD file, YouMagine will do it for you!
We want to promote the uploading of native formats so we intend to start rendering popular formats into STL for you, so you don’t have to add these yourself. We were thinking of STEP as the next one, but we’re unsure how to generate STLs from STEP files, at this moment. If you have any ideas, let us know!

Labyrinth Gift Box by IRobertI

Many fixes and tweaks, among which:

For a design that is collected by someone, we’ve fixed that you can’t press the “x” button to delete it from the collection if belongs to someone else (thanks for reporting, @Didier).
The unread message counts should be correct now.
File type icon sizes were off in some cases.
The YouTalk widget will not switch designs as quickly anymore (thanks @Kolia)
The “share” buttons on a design’s page should now work again.
Zip files weren’t always recreated for an updated design, should now happen.
Search results can now also be retrieved in .json format. Great for those who integrate search in an application.
Some performance upgrades.
Login icons are now bigger in the current release (thanks @Blizz for reporting!).
There were some issues with comments and they are now working again in Safari and Firefox. Thank you to Jonnyischof for letting us know this.
There were some upload issues that were resolved. Thank you for telling us IRobertI.

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.