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BooshDESIGN

BooshDESIGN changelog

What changed,
release by release

Every published version of BooshDESIGN, newest first. The latest build is one click away at the top.

Latest release

Version 0.5.1Beta

Get BooshDESIGN 0.5.1

Before you install

Boosh Apps make every attempt to ensure your data remains with you and is able to be exported and kept safe.

Please remember to take backups when installing new versions.

  1. Version 0.5.1

    Beta

    The brush and the eraser are rebuilt, and a saved drawing now comes back with everything you put in it.

    New

    • A brush panel. Choose Brush or Eraser and its settings appear: a plain round brush, taper and entry profiles, ink textures, size, and a soft edge on a slider. Each one shows the mark it makes rather than only its name.
    • A ring under the pointer the size of the mark you are about to make, so you can see how big the brush is before you use it. Dashed while erasing.
    • Grid and guides switches, on the top bar beside snapping, so you can opt in or move freely. Hiding the guides stops them pulling as well as showing.
    • Hold Option while resizing to size a shape from its middle, so it grows without moving.

    Improved

    • The brush stays in hand between strokes, and so does the pencil. Both used to hand you back to the Move tool after every mark.
    • Erasing shows as you drag, instead of appearing when you let go.
    • Right-click a selection anywhere inside its marching ants to cut with it.
    • Taking hold of the rotate handle opens the nine-point pivot, so the point it turns about is in front of you while you turn it.
    • The font browser is wider and three across, each family set in its own typeface, and the three your design system uses sit across the top.
    • Cut and eraser controls are on the context bar, and the sentences that were making it wide have gone to the hints at the top.

    Fixed

    • A saved drawing comes back whole. Cut-outs, erasing, gradients, patterns, crops and drop shadows were written to the file but never read back, so reopening a drawing quietly lost them.
    • A star-shaped hole appeared when erasing. A brush mark that crossed its own path cancelled itself out, leaving an angular shape with points on it.
    • Erasing no longer undoes a cut made with the pen, so a traced cut-out can be tidied up without the whole picture coming back.
    • Every other eraser stroke did nothing. The eraser was rubbing out its own previous stroke instead of the picture.
    • Subtracting a coloured shape left it half cut out instead of cut out.
    • The gradient tool put you back into Move the moment you picked it, so the drag that followed moved the shape.
    • The artboard belongs to the project. Opening a project left the previous drawing on the board, still pointing at the other project's file, so saving could write into a project you had left.
    • A drawing was marked unsaved by the act of opening it.
    • Brush marks are named for the brush rather than being listed as paths, and a round brush now draws an even line that does not spike where you change direction.

  2. Version 0.5.0

    Your work is far safer, projects can have many pages, and the artboard gains selections, adjustments, background removal and path editing. This release also includes everything from 0.2.1, 0.3.0 and 0.4.0, which were never published separately.

    New

    • Autosave, and a safety net. Work saves every sixty seconds. Closing the window waits for the save and asks first: Save and close, Close without saving, or Cancel. The last three versions are kept as ordinary files in your project folder, so you can recover them even without the app.
    • Pages. A project is now a folder of pages sharing one design system, and the Link field offers your pages and the anchors on each page. Export any page as a PDF, PNG or JPG.
    • Layout blocks. Two up, Three up and Four up sections arrive already laid out, and what you build in one cell repeats in the others.
    • Typography can leave the rails too, like spacing, corners and borders already could, for the times you need a value your scale does not offer.
    • Selections on the artboard that act on the picture underneath: cut out the inside, keep only the inside, and use a pen trace as a selection.
    • Adjustments: brightness, contrast, saturation, hue, levels, blur and posterise as a stack you can reorder, switch off and reset. Through a selection, they correct one area only.
    • Remove a background with a colour key, then tidy it with an eraser that masks rather than destroys, so anything you rub out can be put back.
    • Path editing: add, delete and split points, join paths or close one (Cmd J), outline a stroke and merge shapes into one outline.
    • Richer brushes and effects: textured ink, a rough edge, brush flow, [ and ] for brush size, engraved and embossed text, a picture inside letters, sepia, and inset, outset and double borders.

    Improved

    • Artboard essentials: copy, cut and paste shapes, lock and hide layers, scale several shapes at once, an eyedropper that picks up the token, guides, a grid, and centre snapping that works on rotated shapes. Crop works on rotated pictures and responds to Option and Cmd.
    • Pick rather than type. Icons and pictures come from what is already in your project, font families from what the project declares, and gradient stops can be any colour you like.
    • An interface that fits how you work. Choose which side panels sit on, drag them wider, set the interface size, open several panel sections at once, hide the panels with Cmd full stop, and press A (or Cmd right-click) for the insert menu. Dots show which sections hold your decisions.
    • A new app icon and a fresh look, with a purple mesh on the startup screen and glass panels. The window opens to fit your screen, the canvas starts at 1440 wide, and panels gain Accessibility settings, aspect ratio and linked sides for margin, padding, borders and corners.

    Fixed

    • Protection against lost work. Closing the window straight after a change could leave nothing saved, adding a page and saving could delete another page's styling, and an empty document could overwrite a real page. All three are fixed.
    • Opening one project in two copies of the app could let one overwrite the other. The second copy now refuses to save and tells you why.
    • New projects start clean. They no longer inherit the last project's design system, text no longer falls back to a system font instead of the one your design system names, and unused styles are left out of the files you hand over.

  3. Version 0.2.0

    A big step forward for the artboard, with shadows, a colour wheel, alignment tools and Google Fonts, plus easier resizing and borders on the design canvas.

    New

    • Google Fonts, built in. Browse, preview and add fonts to your project, with each font's licence collected alongside the files so the project is ready to hand over.
    • Drop shadows on the artboard, on any shape, picture or group, including inner shadows, and a shadow that follows a cut-out's outline.
    • A colour wheel, with free colour on the artboard (where a logo is not bound by your palette), a hue strip and sliders for fine adjustment.
    • An arrange strip across the top of the artboard: align, distribute, flip and combine shapes, plus quarter turns for anything selected.
    • Lean a shape with skew handles on the artboard, and Lean and Tip on the design canvas.
    • More control over text on the artboard: weights, typefaces, alignment, multi-line text with line spacing, and styling part of a text.
    • Border by dragging. Grab an edge of the selection to set the border width on your scale.

    Improved

    • Layers are easier to manage. Drag to reorder, duplicate and rename layers, and pin the layers pane and resize it.
    • Resizing works from every edge, and dragging left or up now resizes rather than pushing a margin.
    • Sliders alongside numbers for stroke width, blur, angle, text size, corners and shadow offsets. Crop by dragging an edge, soften a cut-out's edge, and keep a pen path's handles after drawing.
    • Zoom with Cmd+, Cmd- and Cmd 0 on whichever canvas is in front, without scaling the whole window. Export now has its own button next to New and Save.
    • A placed icon takes the page's colour, so the colour controls change the icon rather than the box around it.

    Fixed

    • Pictures can be placed on the artboard. Placing one arrived as a broken image, and dropping or pasting one landed in the wrong place.
    • Resizing or moving a cut-out or cropped picture now takes its outline with it. Flatten works on several shapes, not only a group, and the text knock-out effect shows the picture through the letters again.

  4. Version 0.1.0

    The first release of BooshDESIGN: a design canvas that is a real browser, where every control is bound to your design system, plus an artboard for drawing the graphics that go on the page.

    New

    • Built on the GenCSS design system. BooshDESIGN starts from GenCSS and keeps its design system file format exactly, so a design system moves freely between GenCSS, FEWD Studio and BooshCMS.
    • Design mode. A canvas that renders real CSS, so what you see is the page itself. Change a token and the design repaints straight away, without losing your selection.
    • Styling that offers tokens and nothing else. Colours, spacing, type, corners and shadows come from your design system, and every group has a route back to the design system when the value you want is not there yet.
    • Projects that are ordinary web projects. New and Open work with a normal folder of HTML, CSS and assets, laid out so FEWD Studio can open it as it is.
    • Components, in two kinds. Sections go on a page, and element components such as cards go inside them. Every instance of a component shares one style.
    • Tools that draw on the grid, not at absolute positions. Drag out a box, round a corner or pull padding and margin with handles, and every value lands on your scale. Draw boxes side by side and the parent becomes a grid.
    • Work the way a designer does. Presets named Title, Heading, Body text, Button and so on; double-click any text to edit it in place; paste or drop images straight onto the canvas; think in pixels while the output is written in rem.
    • States, layers and motion. Style hover, focus and active; style an element's before and after layers as boxes; put a video or a parallax picture behind a section.
    • Effects: shadows from your shadow scale, opacity, gradients built from your palette, and shadows and outlines on text.
    • A width slider on the canvas, so you can watch fluid type and spacing respond across screen sizes, and undo and redo throughout.
    • An artboard for graphics. Draw with a pen, pencil, brushes, shapes and text, combine and group shapes, crop and rotate, bend text round a circle and make patterns. Colours stay design tokens, so recolouring the design system recolours your logo.
    • Export. Hand over the project as one page, as separate files, or as a folder of components. Export drawings as SVG, PDF, PNG, WebP or JPG, one at a time or a whole folder at once.
    • Documentation built in, in a drawer inside the app.