Twelve releases since September 2013
Everything that has shipped, in order, including the releases where very little happened and the two where we broke something and had to say so. Point releases are free within a version. There have been four whole number versions in thirteen years.
- Cutting order hints on the printed diagram, showing which rips to make first.
- Summary page at the end of a print run, listing every part and which sheet it is on.
- Fixed grain locks being ignored on parts brought in from a CSV. This was wrong for the whole of the 4.2 release, which is seven months, and we are sorry about it.
- Fractional inches are entered and shown as fractions rather than decimals.
- Layouts of more than 200 parts solve roughly four times faster.
- Fixed the offcut location note being dropped when a job was saved and reopened.
- Rewritten layout view. Parts can be dragged, and a part that will not fit says so instead of overlapping its neighbour.
- Team licence introduced, with shared settings and a shared offcut library.
- Settings are saved against a material rather than a job, so a saw is set up once.
- Windows 11 and macOS 13 supported.
- A layout is compared against the previous run of the same list, so you can see whether a change was worth making.
- Parts list exports as CSV.
- Printing on high resolution printers no longer thins the part outlines to nothing.
- Templates. A saved list can be reopened, quantities changed, and re-run.
- Parts can be dragged to a new position on a sheet.
- Diagrams save as PDF.
- Offcut library. Leftover pieces go on the stock list with a size and a location, and are used before any new sheet is opened.
- Pro licence introduced to pay for the above.
- Minimum offcut size setting, so the library does not fill up with packing material.
- Lengths as well as sheets. Set a stock length with no width and the one dimensional problem is solved by the same code.
- Minimum piece length, so a layout cannot hand you a 140 mm piece to finish a row.
- Grain direction, set per part, with three states: along, across, or free.
- Grain locked parts are marked on the printed diagram.
- Solver rewritten. It now tries several different orderings and keeps whichever fits on fewest sheets. On jobs over sixty parts this is usually one sheet better.
- macOS version, at last.
- More than one sheet size in a single job.
- Imperial units.
- Part labels printed on the diagram rather than only in the list.
- Trim allowance.
- CSV import of a parts list.
- Fixed a rounding error that lost a millimetre on every cut, which on a sheet of small parts was costing a part a sheet.
- First release. A parts list, one sheet size, a kerf setting, and a printed diagram at one sheet per page.
- That was all it did, and nobody asked for anything else until the following spring.
How versions and upgrades work
A point release, so 4.0 to 4.2, is free to anyone with a 4 series licence. A whole number version, so 4.0 to 5.0, is a paid upgrade at about half the licence price.
Nothing is forced. If 4.4 does what you need, it will keep doing it, and we have customers still running 3.5 on machines that are not allowed on the internet. There is no server for them to be cut off from.
Two releases here are apologies
Version 1.1 fixed a rounding error that lost a millimetre on every cut, which on a sheet of small parts was quietly costing people a part per sheet for five months.
Version 4.4 fixed grain locks being ignored on parts imported from a CSV, which was wrong for the seven months that 4.2 was the current release. Both are in the list above rather than tidied out of it.
Read on
What the application does now, what it costs, and who writes it.