Hi,
The team has worked on a new and upgraded version of the Customizer.
You can test it out by adding “/new-customizer” at the end of Thing url (for example: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:7253198/new-customizer).
Please share your feedback below!
It looks great. I’ll play around with it more and hopefully bring back a little more constructive feedback.
Thanks for all your work on this!
The updated user interface looks really good and the preview image is a huge improvement over the old version. I just ran a couple of tests and they worked as expected. The new thing appeared under my profile almost instantly versus the minute or two it took for the old customizer. The preview images on the created thing took a couple of minutes to show up, but I am guessing that the thing previews are created by a different system and not the customizer. I like that creating a thing now takes you to the thing creation page where you can edit the information before publishing the thing.
In short, I think it looks and works a lot better than the old one!
I tested with this thing:
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:7390274
Some suggestions:
Make the title text on the parameters boxes bit smaller - they should be smaller than the Parameters section title. As they are now, they take up a lot of screen space.
Add a Create Thing button after the last parameters box. If you open a lot of boxes to set the parameters, you have to scroll back up to the top of the page to find the Create Thing button.
Have the Show dimensioned text option under Feedback Settings automatically set itself to no when you click Create Thing. The user should not have to remember to hide the text when creating the STL. Perhaps change the name of this option to Show dimensioned text in STL and the user has to set it to yes to get the text in the output. That is, show the text in the preview but do not emit it in the STL unless the user asks for it.
Some of those things in the menu setup might be things that the designer needs to alter such as the default setting for “Show dimensional text”. I set it to be on by default. I can also move it to the top position rather than the bottom as menu layout can be controlled in the scad file. I haven’t checked to see if I can control the display programatically or not. I expect that there is probably a way but I have only been using scad for a short time. I was waiting to see when the customizer was updated before I did much more with the scad stuff.
Thanks for you good feedback. Regarding the last point, I think this is @ksihota who added this feature in the scad file itself (it’s not a site-wide feature for the new Customizer)
yes, it is some coding that calculates the size of the cells to provide some extra information to someone who might need to know what the cell size will be based on the parameters they chose. I display the information as a text model because it was the only way I could figure out how to make that information available as parameters were changed. The problem with that method is that it becomes an STL model so I added the ability to hide it so it does not export as part of the model. I made its default as On so users can actually see it working. If they don’t see it they will probably not know it is an available feature. Menu naming, positioning, and visibility may not be clear so anyone can leave me comments in the Thing and I can look at addressing any issues in my models.
Thanks for the notes on the display text. Not sure what I was thinking when I wrote my comment, but it now seems obvious that it was a brain fart. Keep in mind that I live in Saskatchewan voluntarily, so my mental faculties are questionable at best.
It was just that the idea of having text that could inadvertently make it into the STL seemed like such an odd thing to implement that I assumed that had to be something from Thingiverse and not from someone who actually designs and prints stuff. At first blush, that feature seems almost as odd as a taxonomy of every vehicle make and model ever made on a 3D print file sharing site.
Almost as odd, but not quite.
Yeah, it would be nice if there was some way to display information using scad other than to render it as a model. When I am making containers I usually want to know what the actual cell sizes are so since the calculation is pretty easy to do programmatically I added that function to my code. The problem was how to display it so the user could see it. I didn’t find anything to display this so I opted for the method you see.
When I used your thing to create a simple 223 ammo box, I did the math manually to figure out how big the box would have to be to accommodate cells of a particular size and walls of the desired thickness. My grade 9 sadistic soulless monster math teacher would be proud. I actually modified your code to add parameters for cell dimensions and it would size the box automatically. Then I got distracted with a taxonomy of car makes and models and trim levels and colours and upholstery options and those little pine tree air freshener things and moved on.
Luckily I was only a grade 8 math teacher so I got to teach fun math like Algebra. I do the same thing. I try something out (like using scad) and then get sidetracked or have to go back to things I have to get done so I end up not going much further with some projects. Too much work and not enough hours in the day.