Version 1.5.0
New features
- Two new companions: a rabbit and a guinea pig. The rabbit is a rabbit and not a hare, and the picker now puts the two side by side so the difference can be seen rather than explained. Its ears are a little over half the length of the hare's, its body is wider than it is tall, and it has something no hare has: lop ears, a pair that hangs down past the cheeks — or just one of them, with the other still standing up. Short-and-upright and wide-and-round make four in all. Three tails as well: a cottontail whose edge ripples instead of being a plain circle, a raised one lifted along the haunch, and a small flat one tucked in. It arrives in lilac, which no other animal here wears. The guinea pig is a loaf: a broad, low body with the head sunk into it and no neck in between. It has no tail, because a guinea pig has not got one and a control that can only say "none" is worse than no control at all. What it has instead is a coat — smooth, rosetted with eight small whorls of fur down its flanks, long-haired with the hair hanging in locks that change the outline of the animal itself, or crested with a tuft of uneven locks on the forehead. Four small ears set low and wide, and a coppery caramel colouring that keeps it apart from the fox and the dog it stands beside.
- A frog. Not one of the companions and not built like one: a frog's eyes sit on TOP of its head and bulge out past the outline, and taking that away leaves a green mouse. So it has its own three body shapes — sitting, wide and slim — with the eye domes drawn as part of the head rather than as two circles stuck on it. Four leg poses: haunches folded beside the body, splayed wide, one leg forward, or mid-jump with both legs extended and the hands off the ground. Five eyes, from big and round to half-lidded, wide awake, happy and winking. And three things to go with it: a crown for the Froschkönig, a fly hovering at the end of a dashed flight path, or a lily pad to sit on.
- A pond, and lily pads to go on it. The pond is water seen from above rather than an object standing on the ground, and its near edge is on the same line every other figure stands on, so a frog placed beside it has its feet at the water's edge. It comes as open water, with reeds — cattails and arching strap leaves growing from behind the surface — or with stones set half in the water and half on the bank. The lily pads float rather than stand: three leaves, six, or three with a water lily opening in the cleft of the largest. Each leaf has the wedge cut out of it that makes it a leaf and not a green counter.
- Patterns on the scenery. Every tree, cloud, hill, bush, moon, star and pond can now carry one of the fourteen patterns on its main surface, under a control called Surface. The pattern lands on the part of the shape it belongs on and nowhere else: on a tree's foliage but not its trunk, on the cloud but not the rain falling out of it — and on each star, leaf and blade of grass individually, sized to that shape rather than to the whole group.
- The insert panel draws the figures instead of showing emoji. Every entry under Owls, Other animals and Scenery is now a real drawing of that figure, made by the same code that draws it on the page — so the tile is what you are about to get. An emoji never was: 🐇 is a different rabbit on Windows, on a Mac and on Android, and none of them is the rabbit this app draws. The panel is taller for it.
Improvements
- Thin figures are much easier to pick up, especially with a finger. A click has always landed on a figure's actual outline rather than on the invisible box around it, which is what lets you tap the owl in front of the moon and not the moon. On something as fine as a spider web that same rule made it nearly untappable: the only thing to aim at was the silk, about three pixels of it. Every figure now carries an invisible layer that follows its own shape but is drawn finger-thick, so a tap near a thread counts as a tap on it. Measured on a web at a normal size, the target grew from a quarter of the web to two thirds on a touch screen — and the gaps between the threads stay open, so whatever is behind the web can still be picked.
- The water lily keeps its petals at every outline thickness. The flower's own outline now stops where the notches between its petals would close up, so turning the outline all the way up no longer turns the bloom into a dark green rosette with the pink squeezed out of it.
- Patterns show up on wood. A branch and a bare tree take a dark bark colour for their pattern instead of the owl's pattern brown, which was so close to the wood underneath that picking Dots or Checks left the figure looking untouched. The bare tree also carries the pattern out along its branches rather than stopping at the trunk.
Bug fixes
- The fish has a mouth again. It had a dark curl near its face that was meant to be one, drawn at a fixed size a fixed distance behind the snout — which put it across the tip of the round fish, dangling off the front of the slim one like a hook on a line, and floating in the middle of the puffer's cheek attached to nothing. It is now a small smile that starts at the snout on all three bodies, because it is measured against the fish instead of in absolute units. The gill line beside it had the same fault and the same cure: on the slim fish it was taller than the fish was deep and ran out through the back and the belly.