Following a not-so-cryptic tease last week, UltiMaker has pulled back the curtain on a revamped look, feel, and functionality for its popular 3D model repository, Thingiverse.
Despite quiet updates over the past years, Thingiverse has remained relatively stagnant in terms of new features – especially in the wake of last year’s Ultimaker-Makerbot merger. Now, that’s changed, according to Arjen Dirks, UltiMaker’s director of community software.
“This is the first time we’ve released an improvement in the past year when people will see forward-looking changes,” he said in an interview with All3DP. “We are really moving forward again with Thingiverse.”
To Thingiverse users, this will perhaps be most apparent on the site’s “Thing” and “Make” pages. The changes vary from the visual, like new fonts, to the functional, including a redesigned comment section and a reworked, scrolling image (and video) carousel from which users can directly download files.
Enhancements to the search function, “seamless” login, a commitment to improved support, and the return of the customizer tool, which enables users to personalize their 3D prints, are also among the updates here, which are too numerous to list in full. In total, however, they manage to be both expansive and subtle, meaning the user experience remains familiar yet noticeably refined.
“These are a cumulation of making so many changes to the things that frustrated people – login was broken, search was broken, navigation was broken, and sometimes hard. The customizer was completely offline,” Dirks said. “We spent the better part of last year developing a full understanding of it and making improvements. Now, for the first time, it’s not about fixing complaints and bugs – it’s about moving forward.”
This modernization isn’t only user-focused, however. The changes to Thingiverse also keep UltiMaker developers in mind, with a “modular” build that makes continuous development exponentially easier.
“The Thing and Make pages are the first that have been rebuilt to meet current coding standards,” Mariska Maas, UltiMaker’s technical community manager, said. “It’s now also in the stage where we can start implementing changes because it’s more standardized and easier for the developers to make changes.”
Quite how the new Thingiverse will stand up against the new and not-so-new platforms that have thrived during the site’s wilderness years remains to be seen. In the view of Dirks and Maas – as that of UltiMaker – the update serves as an announcement that Thingiverse, for all intents and purposes, is back. Not that it ever really went anywhere.
You can see the changes for yourself over on Thingiverse. For more about the revamp, check out the UltiMaker blog for the full write-up.
Editor’s note – disclosure: Before becoming All3DP’s trusted freelance newswriter, Adam Kohut served as a freelance senior copywriter at Ultimaker.
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License: The text of "UltiMaker Reveals the New-Look Thingiverse" by All3DP is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.