Just to give you all an update on progress and expectations for the next release. We were prepping to have a release ready for the end of the year, but we won’t release it until early in January. We generally try to avoid releases too close to Christmas before many of the developers go away. The last thing we want is to find unexpected bugs that we can’t fix quickly which cause you grief.
This January release will include the first version of the new mobile optimised HTML, some improvements to the desktop HTML (current HTML version), and some forerunners to the full blog release, e.g. new shapes components (including gradients, images fills, effects like drop shadows, etc. - see below) and a few other bits and pieces. There is also quite a big change to the way we store data. The full blog will come out a few weeks later.
We are choosing to do the release in 2 parts as there is a lot going into it and it’s much easier to manage this way. We appreciate this means the blog will be later than you expected, but we hoped to whet your appetite with some of these changes sooner rather than later, and the mobile HTML improvements will be in this first release.
In the meantime, here’s a few examples of the kinds of things the new shapes objects can do that will really open up some of the design possibilities in your sites...
New Shapes
All of these are achieved using the new basic 'shapes', with a number of effects, fills and gradients applied to them which are part of the shape settings. So the design possibilities are pretty wide ranging!
Stars - using 2 semi-transparent gradient fills, with thick border and blur effect on star shapes
Swiss cheese - using bevel border with blur, and multiple shapes aligned to appear to be one layer
Cute - Eiffel Tower has a flat image fill, chunky white border and drop shadow, while the girl has a chunky dotted yellow border and pink/purple drop shadow
Splat - a borderless image fill (car), with 2 transparent PNG 'splats' in brown and white, positioned to create a contrast
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