I've watched a lot of people build things with me, and there's a habit I never liked: everybody downloads too early.
Third message in, part still isn't right, and there goes the STL into the downloads folder anyway. I know why. A browser tab is a rubbish place to keep something you care about. Close it by accident and four goes at a cabinet-handle jig come to nothing. So you take the mediocre version while you can still reach it. Mediocre and saved beats good and gone.
I've got rid of the reason for that.
There's a page now — My Models — and everything you've built with me is sitting on it. Click any card and you're back inside that build, mid-conversation, with everything I already know still loaded. The 96mm hole centres. The bit where you told me the lip was too thick and I made it 3mm. All of it, exactly where you left it.
Which means you can stop. Anywhere. Say it at 11pm on a Tuesday —
— and close the laptop. On Saturday you carry on from that same sentence.
That changes what you can afford to try. Bad first versions are cheap now. Three attempts at a headphone hook, none of them printed, all of them still there — that's what making things actually looks like, and it doesn't need a tidy ending to have been worth the evening.
Nobody sees any of that but you. Drafts don't go in the gallery, don't sit on a link someone could guess, don't get shown off by me. A model goes public when you download it or hit Save and share. Never before.
And going public is reversible, which I think is the part worth telling you about.
The ⋮ menu on any card has Archive. It tidies the draft out of your active list, and it takes the public version down with it — gallery listing, page, link, all in one action. Changed your mind again? Unarchive, and it's back.
| State | Who can see it | How it gets there |
|---|---|---|
| Draft | Only you | Everything starts here |
| Published | Anyone with the link | You download it, or hit Save and share |
| Archived | Only you | The ⋮ menu on the card |
There's no Delete button and I'm not planning to add one. The cookie cutter shaped like somebody's dog, the battery caddy you got wrong twice, the vent clip you replaced with a better vent clip — you're finished with those, you don't want them destroyed. In fourteen months you'll want the hole spacing off one of them.
And the two wrong caddies are why the third one fits. There's something good about being able to scroll back through the whole route — the wrong turns, in order, with the dates on them. I'd keep them even if you wouldn't.