Alpha Announcement Feedback

[aluhrs13]

Hi Everyone!

If you're reading this, hopefully you're interested in trying out My Mini Index! The goal of MMI is to help 3d printing enthusiasts organize, search, and view their local STL files quickly and easily. A lot of people will have folders and folders of organized or unorganized STL files from Patreons, Kickstarters, Thingiverse, etc. Both Windows and Mac don't have a great tool for quickly viewing and organizing these files, and MMI aims to fill that gap. MMI is a separate experience from The Mini Index, but I expect over time I'll add features to cross between the two.

If you want to try out MMI today, be aware that it will break in the near future. The current back-end won't scale past a thousand or so files and I'm going to re-architect it entirely and break things in the process. Please don't put in a bunch of effort into setting up your collection on the current version. Another thing worth noting is that I don't plan on charging for MMI anytime soon, but I may offer some sort of paid plan in the future to share your collection and sync between devices.

The biggest thing I want to ask is that if something goes wrong please tell me! There's no error handling or reporting yet. If something goes wrong or is just unexpectedly blank, you can press F12 to open your browsers DevTools then hit "Console" and look for red text with an error. If you see something, please send me that output to help me fix it!

I would love feedback on the basic workflows:

• Indexing: To add files, you simply go to the Directories page, hit the +, then select a folder with STLs in it. MMI will scan that folder and any subfolders, adding any STL files to your index. I highly recommend adding a "higher up" folder in your collection and let it search subfolders, rather than child folder. Right now MMI has to ask for permission for every folder and if you have a lot it gets tedious. There's a setting to exclude a subdirectory by name if you don't want to import a certain folder.
• Editing and tagging: Once a file is imported you can go to the Pending page to view the list of all the files that were added. Clicking a file listed here will jump into the editing experience where the STL will be loaded (or a button to load will be shown if permissions are needed). The STL rendering can be moved and zoomed in and out, when you save, a screenshot of the rendering will be taken and used as the thumbnail. You can put any tags you want in the Tags field, separated by commas. You can also remove a Mini from your index here.
• Searching: Files are searchable immediately after indexing by their name and they're tagged with all the words in their name and the names of every folder in the tree to get to it.
• Viewing: Viewing is extremely basic right now, just showing you the thumbnail, the tags, and the URL. Clicking the pencil in the top-left will jump into the editor view.

Feel free to comment on this GitHub issue with thoughts, comments, or suggestsions, or send a message to the my-mini-index channel of our Discord.

That's (slightly more than) the basics of where this is at right now! Head over to https://myminiindex.com to try it out!

What's next? There's a lot I want to do, so I'm not sure which of these will come first. Feel free to comment or add suggestions to any of the linked issues below or send a message on Discord.
- Redo back-end
- Listen to feedback on everyting above 😀
- Generate thumbnails on import
- Folder-based workflows (Browsing and Tagging)
- Rotate rendering buttons
- Related Minis
- Sync and Share