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New in Fabman: Booking info on bridge displays (and more)

The holiday season is in full swing and it’s time for us to deliver a few presents before the year comes to an end.

Over the next few days we’ll roll out a firmware update to all Bridges. Here’s what this update will bring – plus a few other improvements we made in the past month.

Booking information on the Bridge

Imagine you just arrived at the lab. You go to the laser cutter, unpack your materials, set everything up. And when it’s finally time to switch on the machine, it doesn’t work because it’s currently booked – or out of order. Super frustrating.

From now on, we’ll show this information on the bridge display at all times – not just when you try to switch it on.

The laser cutter is currently booked The laser cutter is out of order

Scan the QR code for quick access to the machine’s booking calendar – or get more info about what’s broken and when it will be fixed.

As soon as we implemented this, we were wondering why we hadn’t done it earlier. And there’s more! From now on, you also see if there’s an upcoming booking within the next 24 hours:

Next booking (today) Next booking (next day)

So you’ll know exactly how much time you have left before it someone else’s turn.

Remembering your scroll position

Another one of those “Why didn’t we do this earlier” moments: All Fabman apps now remember your scroll position when you jump back and forth between long lists.

Previously, you had to find your position in the list every time you navigated back: Before

Now it will stay exactly where you were: After

Seems obvious, right? Well, it’s not as easy as it seems to get this behavior right in modern, dynamic web apps – especially in “infinite” lists like the activity log. But we did it. And we hope you like it.

Other changes

As always, we’ve also released several other improvements and fixes over the past month:


We’re also working on some bigger improvements for the new year. Stay tuned and follow us on Twitter or Facebook for updates.