Formlabs, the makers of the Form 1 resin-based 3D printer, released a Macintosh-capable version of their PreForm printer management software. Their strategy going forward is to maintain “feature parity” between the two versions and even release them simultaneously.
We believe this to be an important step into OS/X space, which has been traditionally very poorly supported by the 3D printing world, with a few notable exceptions. Typically 3D printer management software is released only for Windows, shutting out a reasonable chunk of the public and an even greater percentage of creatives. We suspect this bias has been due to a focus on industrial uses of 3D printing, while we believe there is also a very large creative population. Kudos to Formlabs for this move.
Meanwhile, they’ve teamed up with longtime 3D model analyzer NetFabb to include automatic mesh repair within PreForm. This feature should greatly simplify the process of preparing print jobs by eliminating the need for separate tools and heaving files to and fro.
Not a bad week for Formlabs.
Via Formlabs
