Hey there, fellow 3D printing enthusiast! It's been a while since our last update, so we're here today with a big list of updates and changes that have dropped all the way from early April till today!
Like usual, we've been hard at work developing new features and improving existing features, as well as do a bunch of work behind the scenes to ensure the continued stability of the SimplyPrint platform.
Since April, we have released no less than 18 features & additions (big and small), fixed 20+ bugs - most of them reported by our awesome users, and 8 / 10 times fixed within an hour of the issue being reported. We've also been working on some bigger features and changes behind the scenes that we'll also talk some about in this blog post!
Enjoy, and feel free to skip the sections that may not directly affect you, as this is a "mixed-bag" update, ranging from changes affecting everyone, to just hobbyists or just schools and enterprise!
✨ Schools: Teacher role & classes + general enterprise SSO mapping update
Schools in SimplyPrint can now mark a user as a "Teacher", as well as assign classes or grades to users.
This is to be used in combination with features like our upcoming "Academy" feature and calendar printer-booking feature.
With this update came a bigger SSO update as well - also available to the Print Farm plan. This allows you to map SSO groups to SimplyPrint user groups (which handles permissions), to automatically place users in a specific group when they log in! SSO mapping also applies to the "Teacher" role and class list for users of schools!
✨ New small feature: profile pictures
A little update to refreshen the look of the platform was released today (Aug 26th), giving you the ability to choose your own profile picture!
Previously there was just a little dull user icon, where there now is a more colorful profile picture display. You can upload a custom image, use "Gravatar", or just keep the default colorful display of your initials!
This feature, and the design for it, was voted on in our Discord server! A good example of that if you want a say in the development of SimplyPrint; let your voice be heard!
Bambu Lab integration update: what's new?
Though we've let just about 90% of all who signed up for the Bambu Lab integration waitlist into the beta, there are still some on the waitlist, and probably more who haven't signed up yet, and are awaiting the public release of the Bambu Lab integration. So, we're here with an update!
We're pleased to say that the development is going well! We're at a point where there are very few bugs that are Bambu-Lab-specific, meaning we're very close to being able to mark our Bambu Lab integration "production-ready", and remove the long-applied "Closed beta" badge!
To keep the feedback at a manageable level, ensuring we're not flooded with new users and, especially, support, beyond what we have capacity for, we're still keeping the Bambu Lab integration in closed beta for a little while yet. More updates will follow soon!
Thanks for your all's patience during the development of the Bambu Lab integration! We promise it'll be worth the wait, for those of you still waiting!
A look behind the curtains of a small startup; the work you don't see.
Click to expand if you're interested in hearing some about the more "boring", "corporate" things going on behind the scenes, giving some insight into our small startup! Otherwise, keep scrolling to get to the full changelog!
Though this blog has been silent for a while, the development of SimplyPrint is far from standing still! (as you can see from the massive "Full changelog" section below as well!). This section of the blog post will give you a little glimpse at all the stuff you as a user may not see when looking at SimplyPrint.
We're still in a heavy development sprint, coding every day, fixing bugs, continuing development on larger features and making small improvements to the platform - that's what most of our time is spent doing! But, with a growing platform comes all the more boring stuff that needs to be taken care of too - and lots of it, taking up a lot of time...
There are two things in particular that has taken a lot of time and planning;
1. Billing system update: full rework, + PayPal & invoicing w/ bank transfer support, switching to a new accounting system, and
Over the past 4 months we have been working on a full rework of our billing system. This has entailed rewriting most of the code (we developed our own system, using the "Stripe" ecosystem). This has been quite the undertaking, but a much-needed update to better allow us to add new add-ons and offerings to the SimplyPrint platform, such as our upcoming (shhh!) AI failure detection add-on, shop system add-on, + whatever else we - or third-parties - may add in the future!
Our old billing system was too "stiff", not made for anything but users having a subscription plan and 3 possible add-ons; extra printers, extra storage space and extra users; that was it.
With this new system, going live soon, we can finally add PayPal support, as well as support sending you invoices for bank transfer payments, no longer requiring bigger accounts, and especially schools, to pay by credit card, or get a tailor-made plan.
This has also entailed switching to a new accounting system. This has been exhaustively cumbersome, expensive and time-consuming, but this too was needed, as we've entered into a new tax bracket in the European Union, requiring us to soon bill you a little differently if you're a private consumer within the EU. And this our old accounting system couldn't handle.
A great example of something I wish we had known before we started the company, like so many other things! But, this update and all the many months' of work put into it, is soon ready to see the light of day - though you as a user may not even realize there was an update!
2. "CRM" ("customer relationship management") & marketing automation platform: for newsletters and automatic emails
That may just be one of the most boring headlines I've ever written - but that does reflect the level of excitement we have for spending time on this things like this, rather than develop cool stuff for the SimplyPrint platform!
But, there are certain things we need to be able to do, such as send you an email if we change our privacy policy or terms of service, or want to send a newsletter that you have specifically signed up to receive!
Previously, we haven't had a solid way of doing this. If we really wanted to, we had a self-coded script, where we'd have to write an email, write some code that selected the right recipients (e.g. all users on a specific plan), then run some code that sent an email; one by one. Was this a good solution? No! Did it work? Sort of... But as our platform has grown, our need for a solid system where we can keep track of all our customers, split them up into segments to properly target the right users for the right emails.
As our platform is custom-coded with no major framework behind it (though bits of some are getting more and more embedded), there was no magic button to hook up our system with a mailing service such as "Mailchimp" - and even if there was, we'd end up spending potentially hundreds of dollars a month on a marketing platform, where we had to give over a bunch of your data, not being 100% sure where that data ended up...
So, we wanted to do this right. Not give your data to some big corporation that potentially sells your data, and nor did we want your data to leave the European Union if you're a EU customer. So, we opted for the longer road of setting up an open-source self-hosted platform instead, ensuring your data don't leave our servers, and that we're in full control of which emails you're sent.
Today, this integration was completed, now allowing us to actually email you about newsletters and other things that you have specifically signed up to receive! (our newsletters are opt-in, so you'll only receive them if you really want to! And max 1 per month!).
Beyond this, we spend an increasing amount of time on hiring programmers and freelancers for various development projects, and a lot of time on support; manning the live-chat, answering emails, hosting demo meetings and all the correspondence that follows.
All of this comes with the fact that SimplyPrint is no longer a small community, where we - the core team - can spend 24/7 coding. But it's a change we welcome, as it's a sign of more people enjoying SimplyPrint than ever before. These challenges keeps us learning, and if anything, SimplyPrint has been a learning journey for many on the team of often quite young developers.
Thanks for your continued support, for using SimplyPrint and cheering us on - it doesn't go unnoticed.
I'd be curious to hear if anyone are actually interested in reading these company updates. Hit me up in our Discord server if you read this! We don't mind being open and sharing these kind of things, if anyone out there find our journey as a company interesting!
Full changelog
Note that many of the items on this list have been live for a while.
- Enterprise SSO updates:
- SAML Single sign-on now supports "User group mapping"
- This allows you to tell us which groups a user is in during SSO login, and if the group matches a user group (for permissions) that you have set up in SimplyPrint, we'll put the user in this group.
- Mapping can be done per-group in your organization settings inside SimplyPrint.
- Make sure the groups are exposed to us via your SAML SSO provider.
- SAML Single sign-on now supports "User group mapping"
- School plan update:
- ✨ Added "Classes" for users;
- A user can now be in one or multiple classes. This can be used as "grades" too.
- SSO (SAML & "Unilogin") mapping is supported for this as well.
- In the future, you'll be able to assign courses from the SimplyPrint Academy module to specific classes.
- ✨ Added "Teacher" role for users;
- Different from "User groups", as the "Teacher" role doesn't give permissions in the same way as user groups do, but marking a user as a teacher is a great way to quickly identify who's a teacher, and together with the new SSO mappings, when a user is marked as a "Teacher", they can automatically be put in a specific user group, giving them more permissions
- The "Teacher" role is also used in the upcoming - currently in closed beta - "Academy" feature, where you can create courses.
- ✨ Added "Classes" for users;
- ✨ Add user avatar / profile picture support
- You can now upload a profile picture that is displayed in the top right corner of the website, and in the "Settings" page of our app.
- The default profile picture is the first 2 initials of your first & last/middle name, with a colorful background.
- You can change your profile picture in your "Account settings" (https://simplyprint.io/panel/user_settings) to either use "Gravatar", or by uploading your own.
- ✨ New table system (live late April)
- New table design for pages;
- Print queue
- Gcode Macros > Gcode Snippets
- Users page
- Print jobs page
- Printer logs
- User settings > Security Settings > User sessions
- User settings > Active organizations
- Webhooks
- All partner-portal tables
- This new table system brings better responsiveness for screens of all sizes, is more space-efficient, has smaller yet still prominent action buttons, and a unifying design that is carried across the entire platform.
- All tables now have toggleable columns, remembering your choice, allowing you to hide specific columns that you may not care about
- The print queue table now supports searching, filtering and sorting
- The print jobs table now includes the image of the printer in the "Printer" column and is now searchable (names of printed files for now, more searchable columns coming later), + printer model and printer group filtering, + sorting for job status, filename, start time and print cost
- More bulk actions for tables:
- Users page > User approval: Approve or remove multiple users at once
- Gcode Macros > Snippets list: Delete multiple snippets at once
- Multi-tagging for print queue items
- Export update:
- All tables with an "Export" option now supports selecting individual rows manually, just exporting these
- New table design for pages;
- OrcaSlicer integration improvements: (live with Orca V2.1.1 on Jun. 26)
- See pull-request here: https://github.com/SoftFever/OrcaSlicer/pull/4831
- 🐛 Fixed bug where the "Device" tab on log in for some showed "This endpoint is not open to the private API" when trying to log in
- Allow larger uploads than 100 MB
- For Bambu Lab printers, the 3MF file containing all plates are now exported to SimplyPrint rather than a single Gcode file at a time
- Add option for opening the SimplyPrint panel from the "Device" tab after uploading, rather than your default browser
- For Bambu Lab printers, a new option has been added under the printer settings to allow using Bambu Lab's original device monitor instead of the SimplyPrint panel for device tab
- ✨ For multi-tool printers, we now show the currently active spool in the material section in the printer control panel with a little blue dot (live late April)
- ✨ Added "Cool plate" printer setting (live late April)
- Allows the Gcode Analysis "material temperature" check to go up to 35 degrees below the temperature of the material type or spool
- Specifically added to address the Bambu Lab "Cool Plate", where you print PLA with very low temperatures compared to what used to be the industry standard, requiring us to adapt
- "On" by default for all Bambu Lab printers
- ✨ Print Cost Calculation v2 update:
- Proper multi-material support
- Now with MMS mapping support
- Added "printer default to tool 0" support (for Bambu)
- Add client-side support for print cost for new, non-uploaded files in "Start print" file selector (based on Gcode Analysis)
- ✨ Add "LutraCAD" integration: https://simplyprint.io/integrations/lutracad
- ✨ Show tags & material information of queue item in "Quick-queue" (queue button on the printer)
- ✨ Gcode Analysis now treats the first print temperatures prior to actually starting the print, only as a "max" temperature that we check if your printer's nozzle can handle, but only the temperature used when starting the actual print is displayed to the user as the print temperature (to avoid high "material purge" temperatures resulting in negative file matches)
- ✨ Added "Printer material syncing" printer setting (https://simplyprint.io/panel/settings/printers) for Bambu Lab and Prusa MMU3
- ✨ Added badge to show amount of item in a given print queue group (https://suggestions.simplyprint.io/179)
- ✨ Added drag & drop support for print queue groups (https://suggestions.simplyprint.io/213)
- ✨ Made print queue "Done items" lazy-load, speeding up loading times for the print queue
- ✨ Add filename to "Start print via queue" modal (live Jul. 16)
- ✨ Re-implemented "Delete all done items" button for print queue "Done items" section, to quickly clean up the queue history
- Was thought not necessary with the new table system, but that proved wrong
- Partner panel changes & fixes:
- ✨ Add "Overview cards" showing quick stats for all managed accounts
- ✨ Add OEM redirect option: redirect from simplyprint.io to OEM domain for certain accounts
- ✨ Add Danish educational login "Unilogin" support for partner portal (for Danish partners)
- 🐛 Fix permission issue when managed account hadn't been "visited", rendering you unable to load list of users and printers
- 🐛 Fix issue where if partner only had one managed company, the company switcher UI was not shown
- 🐛 Fix OEM "collapse" issue, where it reloaded the page on expand of certain collapses in printer settings
- Direct Prusa (only available to partners); Change Prusa integration default port to 443
- Bambu Lab updates:
- There are a lot of updates and changes specifically for the SimplyPrint Bambu Lab integration. But, as this Bambu Lab integration is still in closed beta and things change all the time, these changes and updates are found in the private Discord channel for the Bambu Lab beta.
- 🐛 Bug fixes
- Finally fixed issue where users without 2FA enabled were often logged out every 24 hours (live Jul. 22)
- Fixed bug where tags where color name but no color hex was defined, not showing up in the tag line
- Fix "Users" page showing "Last online" as "Right now" if user didn't have app
- Fix printer actions dropdown position overflowing screen
- Fixed "Holiday gimmicks" (Aprils fools etc.) not triggering on user's local time, but always looked at UTC time rather than local timezone
- Fixed a few tag-related issues where dropdowns and collapses didn't trigger in the tag editor
- Fixed issue not allowing adding ":[port]" to local printer IP's in printer settings
- Fix sidebar full URLs (e.g. to hub) wrong redirects
- Fix SKU printer settings saving not working for partners, and make it available for all print farms
- Fix folder edit "Validation failed" bug that resulted in some folders not being editable
- Fix Unilogin auto-redirect on /register/{company} not working
- Fix default last user group not being selected automatically for "Group to place new signups in" for organizations, + wrong arrangement of default user groups for Schools plan ("Teacher" was over "Administrator")
- Fix filament "bought at" date being wrong if user isn't on UTC
- Fix bug for multi-extruder printers, on assign of multiple spools assigned (tag "undefaulting" resulting in static material data for an extruder that actually has a spool assigned…)
- Fix issue where, by drag and drop or else how, queue groups where only certain file extensions are allowed, could receive files with non-allowed extensions, and upload them
- Fixed issue where after visit of print job from "Print history" page, the title of the tab may keep updating even after leaving the print job timeline
- Fix one-click print / clear bed start next items from queue not working with more than one MMS mapping
- + Many and more performance optimizations for printer API server, ensuring printer connection stability