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Today we are taking the first steps to creating an environment for external developers to build apps on top of the Easel platform. Our goal is to get people making faster than ever before by creating a system of specific, useful and easy to use design tools. By allowing anyone with an idea and programming chops to dive into Easel and create a custom design tool, everyone in the Easel community benefits.
Almost every design tool out there is general: designed to meet the requirements of many, many uses. Generality means complexity, and complexity means difficulty, especially for newcomers. Instead of one-size-fits-all, we want to create an ecosystem of specific, easy-to-use apps, accessible directly within Easel, that can help you get from idea to design faster than has ever been possible.
As our first example app we turned to a highly requested, but tricky problem: vectorizing images. Our app is simple: just upload an image (or choose one from the web). You can use the “Threshold” and “Invert” options to change the way the image is vectorized. Notice that the image is turned into black and white, the “Threshold” determines the cutoff level.
Here is a very quick demo video. There will be more documentation to come.
We are going to start by releasing this only to beta-testers who request access. You can request access by entering your email here: http://eepurl.com/bpWeRH
What we are looking for from beta testers:
Try out our first app! We want to know if it works well, what you are using it for, etc. Please reply to this thread with screenshots (good or bad!) and let us know how we can improve the experience of using the app itself.
If you are interested in developing apps, reach out to us! Put your email on this list and we will let you know as more documentation is available.
Wow, I just imported a jpeg image and the vectorized image looks great. It was very easy to do. Much quicker than importing the image into Inkscape and vectorizing it there (hoping the parameters were correct) and then importing the image back into Easel.
Yea same here tried it on some images of the internet worked great. Havent tried to cut them yet as my xcarve hasnt arrived yet but looking forward to using this ALOT.
Signed up for testing. I’m not a programmer at all, but I do have quite a bit of experience swearing at Illustrator and Inkscape while trying to vectorize stuff.
I just completed a test cut of my first vectorized image in Easel and it came out pretty good. I need to pay more attention to the depth of the cut, but other than that it works very well.
As soon as all the bright people in this group start creating new apps for Easel this is really going to be a game changer. I see special apps for sign engraving, lithophanes, photograph etches, PCB’s, 2.5D cutting …
