MakerBot launch new Thingiverse app
MakerBot have launched a Thingiverse iOS app today to much excitement. The app allows users to explore the largest community of digital 3D files at their own leisure, store their favourites and share with friends over social media.
Although the app will open the Thingiverse world up to millions of people for on the fly browsing and liking specific designs, for regular users of Thingiverse the best addition to the app will be the ability to share photos of prints.
This photo-sharing feature should greatly improve the Thingiverse experience as those of us who are too lazy to send a photo to our computers and then upload to the site can now take the photo and share at the touch of a button. What this means is that we should get more photos of designs that people have printed meaning we’ll have a better understanding of whether the 3D model is printable or not.
"Launching the MakerBot Thingiverse iOS app has been a goal of ours and we are pretty psyched to launch it today," said Bre Pettis, CEO of MakerBot. "We encourage everyone to download the Thingiverse app and be a part of the Next Industrial Revolution that is being fuelled by 3D printing."
The next logical step for the app and MakerBot to take would be to allow direct printing over a WiFi connection to the next-gen MakerBot, which one can only presume, will be equipped with a wireless function.
In our feature about the Zeepro Zim and in resulting social media discussions it was clear that in-app printing features are very desirable to the public. The Zeepro app allows a user to monitor, pause and stop a print from the app, which broadcasts a live feed of the printing process to your smartphone.
If MakerBot were to include printing features direct from Thingiverse when you’re not even near your printer one can only presume this would encourage a more widespread adoption. In this world of instantaneous gratification 3D printing can seem a long, drawn out process, anything that shortens that process will be beneficial to widespread adoption.
