Day: June 25, 2010

Skeinforge UI suggestions

I rather enjoy building the easy-to-use user interfaces for another website of mine.  I’m always tweaking it and trying to make it better.  Small change, test, ask for input, LRR.1

My last post gave me a great idea.  A large physical console with actual knobs, switches, and dials that all operate Skeinforge.  If I had one of these, I would want it to look like the center console of a TARDIS.  Some of the best Doctor Who moments are when he’s zipping around the console, tapping, flipping, twisting, turning and generally being wacky.

Imagine being able to do that sort of thing and then have a plastic object (of a seemingly correspondingly random quality) pop out of the center?

  1. Lather, rinse, repeat. [↩]

Patience

As MakerBots and RepRaps proliferate, so do the websites and content concerning them.  Gian Pablo Villamil had a really great post about his adventures with Skeinforge.  As with BotHacker’s excellent post about the Skeinforge Cool setting and analysis about the benefits of cooling fans, Gian’s post takes us through each of his Skeinforge changes as well as documenting it’s effect on the print quality.

I wish I had more patience for that.  I tried for a while documenting each change…  but quickly became enamored with the idea of spinning dials and flipping switches in Skeinforge in the (sadly badly) mistaken belief I could make it better.

Test