De releaseopmerkingen zijn beschikbaar in het Engels.
Nieuwe functies
- 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.
Verbeteringen
- 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.
Foutoplossingen
- 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.
Nieuwe functies
- Three new figures: a dog, a spider and a spider web. The dog is the biggest of the companions and the only one whose ears hang — floppy, short and folded, upright, or one of each. It has a wagging, a curled or a stubbed tail, a broad pale muzzle with a proper black nose, and something none of the other animals have: markings. A patch over one eye, a white blaze down the face, or a saddle over the back, each one cut to the shape of the dog so it reads as fur rather than as a sticker. The spider is friendly rather than realistic, and it is built from scratch rather than from the shared animal skeleton — it has no ears, no tail and no muzzle, but eight legs and as many as six eyes. Four sets of legs (arched, angular with a visible knee, long and spindly, short and stout), five faces from two big eyes up to six, and a silk thread to hang from, which is what pairs it with the new scenery. The spider web comes as a round one, one strung across a corner, or one hung with dew. It is the first figure here made entirely of threads, and the dew drops sit exactly on the silk rather than scattered near it.
- Patterns can be turned. Stripes at any angle, a checkerboard rotated into diamonds, chevrons running uphill. The control appears only for the patterns a turn actually changes — a field of dots, a scatter of speckles and a ring of circles look the same at every angle, so no slider is offered for them that would seem to do nothing. Surprise me now rolls an angle too, in eighths of a turn.
- Animals arrive blinking. Every animal — owl, fox, cat, dog, mouse, hare, hedgehog, fish, spider — is placed with the blink already on, so a page comes to life without anybody having to find the setting. The scenery arrives still, because a tree that swayed by itself would be a decision made for you rather than offered. All of it still stands down for a system that asks for reduced motion, the switch in the header still stills the whole page, and every figure can still be set to stand still on its own.
Nieuwe functies
- Figures can be given a small movement. Four of them: eyes that blink, weight shifting slowly from one foot to the other, a barely visible breath, and stars that twinkle. Each figure is set on its own, and each starts at a different point in its loop — worked out from the figure itself, so three owls on a branch blink at their own pace rather than in unison, and do the same again after a reload. The movement is a property of the figure, so it is saved with a project and travels inside a share link. It is off until asked for, and there is a single switch in the header that stops everything on the page at once. The default follows the system setting for reduced motion, so anyone who has asked their device for less movement gets a still page without having to find anything here. Exports do not move. A PDF, an SVG or a PNG is exactly the same file whether a figure is set to blink or to stand still — the movement is added on top of the drawing rather than being part of it, so a print is still a print.
Nieuwe functies
- A design can be shared as a link. One button makes a link with the whole page inside it — every figure, colour, pattern and position. There is no server behind it, nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored anywhere: the design is compressed into the part of the address after the
#, which browsers never send to any server. A single owl comes to about five hundred characters, a collage of a dozen figures to one or two thousand. Opening a link is undoable. Whatever was on the page goes onto the undo stack first, so a link that arrives while you are in the middle of something cannot destroy it — one press of the undo button, or of the button in the message that appears, brings your page straight back. A link is also picked up when the app is already open in the tab, not only when it is loaded fresh. One warning the dialog makes as well: do not put such a link through a link shortener. A shortener keeps the address and throws away everything after the #, which is the design.
Nieuwe functies
- The other animals have parts of their own now. The fox, the cat, the mouse, the hare and the hedgehog each arrived with three sets of parts; they now carry five to seven — body shape, belly patch, ears or spines, tail, eyes, cheeks and an accessory. That is roughly thirty shapes apiece rather than ten. Four of those sets are shared between all of them and placed off each animal's own head, which is what lets one pointed cap fit a mouse and a fox alike: six eye expressions, rosy cheeks or freckles, four belly patches, and eight accessories — a bow tie, a collar with a bell, a scarf, a pointed cap, a flower, a leaf, a crown and a pair of sparkles. What makes each animal itself — its ears, its tail, its muzzle — is still drawn per species. The hedgehog is the one exception to the belly patch, and deliberately: its chest sits behind its own head, so a patch there could only ever come out as a pale ring round its face. It is not offered rather than being offered and looking wrong.
Foutoplossingen
- The "nothing on the page yet" message no longer runs through the zoom controls. It sat along the bottom edge of the canvas, where the zoom buttons also sit, and on a phone the two overlapped into an unreadable tangle. It is now a card in the middle of the canvas, legible over a page of any colour.
Nieuwe functies
- Build an owl out of parts. Twelve sets of parts — body shape, ear tufts, facial disc, eyes, eyebrows, beak, cheeks, belly patch, wings, tail, feet and an accessory — with around seventy shapes between them. Every option is shown as a preview of *your* owl with that part fitted, so the choice is made by looking rather than by reading a name. The parts fit whatever body they are put on: each body shape carries the anchor points the others are measured from, so switching from slim to chubby moves the eyes, wings, feet and hat along with it.
- Colours by role, and patterns that print. Ten colour roles rather than one colour per part, so the pieces that belong together change together, with twelve ready-made schemes — five of them taken from the plumage of real owls. Fourteen patterns for the body, belly and wings, generated as real geometry clipped to the part they decorate, which is why they stay sharp in a print instead of turning into a texture. Surprise me rolls the lot.
- A page with other animals on it. Put several figures on one page and arrange them: drag to move, handles to scale and turn, Shift to snap the rotation to fifteen degrees, and a layer list to stack them front to back. Beside owls there are a fox, a cat, a mouse, a hare, a hedgehog and a fish, and the scenery they live in — a branch, trees, bushes, grass, mushrooms, a moon, stars, clouds and hills.
- A print-ready PDF that is actually vector. The export writes the same curves that were drawn on screen straight into the PDF, so an A2 poster is a few hundred kilobytes, prints at whatever resolution the device has, and carries calibrated RGB colours a print shop can manage. Beside it: SVG at the same physical page size, and PNG or JPEG at a resolution you choose — with real transparency if the page has no background.
- Millimetres from beginning to end. The page is A4, A3, A2, a square or a size typed in by hand, and everything on it is measured the same way. There is no document resolution to pick: a figure 80 mm across is 80 mm across on the paper.
- It works on a phone. Below roughly 900 pixels the layout changes rather than shrinks — the canvas keeps the whole screen and the panels come up over it in a sheet, one at a time, from a bar of six tabs. Figures are dragged with a finger, the page is pinched to zoom, and the drag handles grow for a fingertip.
- German and English, light and dark, switchable without reloading, and the working session comes back after a reload.