Hi! Software developer here.
To answer your question directly: we don’t have any formal list of suggestions. The Autodesk suggestion site is a pretty neat way for them to track user feedback. On products that are more directly software oriented, I’ve seen JIRA used for tracking user ideas. In any case, thanks for pointing this out, and we’ll keep the “scorecard” in mind.
For more insight into how we handle suggestions, most of the software team reads the forums regularly, some more than others. We share in chat and discuss interesting ideas. To get developed the idea has to go through the gauntlet:
- If implemented, would it have the potential to break something on the printer? If it does, we either reject the idea or it bumps the complexity way up.
- Will the idea appeal to a large segment of our users or have high value for a particular segment of
users? - Is the idea compatible with our current process and machine? There are many ideas that just won’t work with what we currently ship. These ideas we’ll put on the shelf for a future product.
- How much effort is required for this idea? Both the effort to develop this feature and to maintain the feature in future releases is considered.
- Do we have the people available with the appropriate skills? Formlabs is pretty small. All of us have our specialties, and some features just don’t fit in any one person’s domain or the domain expert is busy working on other features. We switch things up, but it’s tough to do that too often. (ps: we’re growing fast, and we’re looking for great engineers! http://formlabs.com/company/careers/)
- Are there lower hanging fruit? If there is another idea that is easier to implement and has comparable reward we’ll tend to work on that first.
As we grow, we’re starting to broaden our scope. In the past we’ve been very focused on improving the print process and the reliability of the software. While we’re still committed to those, we’ve expanded to start working on making the entire workflow more intuitive, easy, and powerful.
Recent ideas that have worked their way into software are the multi-resolution layers and the return of the leveling screen. Check out the release notes: http://formlabs.com/products/preform/release-notes/. Scanning the release notes of the next pending release shows several more forum requests have been completed, and I’ll update once we release.
Edit: PreForm 2.7 is out with a number of new features (release notes). From that list, I found five items requested here on the forums:
- X/Y Fine tuning (requested in No more X/Y fine tuning?)
- Tank tracking (discussed in Dashboard material manager feature request)
- Resin level readout (requested in Resin level readout on Form2)
- Loaded resins in printer (also requested in Resin level readout on Form2)
- Layer height optimization for Form1/1+ (requested in Preform 2.6.0, layer height optimization)