What's New

18 Little Big Updates

This week, we have just released a series of new updates - many of which were feature / design suggestions from you 💜

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1. Card Rotation

Rotate images, colors and texts

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2. Multi-card resizing‍

All card types would resize proportionally. For text, the font size changes as you do multi-resize.

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3. Copy from any website, paste to upload

You can copy either text or image from any website, paste in Make the Dot to create a card

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4. Copy and paste across boards

Copy 1 or many cards from one board to another - across all card types with the layout retained

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5. Keyboard Shortcuts ⌨️

On top of the existing copy/paste/duplicate and undo/redo shortcuts, we’ve added the followings:

• Turn Text tool on/off
• Turn Eyedropper on/off
• Zoom to fitUp / down key to move card
• Select all
• Bring to front
• Bring Forward
• Send to Back
• Send Backward
• Hold shift to proportionally resize color cards
• Holding Command/Ctrl to open board or main menu in new page

Full list of keyboard shortcuts can be found here.

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6. Improvements 🎁

• UX update: duplicated cards now appear slightly to the bottom right of the original cards, so you can tell that it’s been copied
• UX update: when you activate Move, you can pan the canvas without accidentally dragging any of the images
• UX update: we would automatically calculate the width of the selection frame for text. Text editor also comes with a predefined line break, so when you’re copying a large text, it’ll be easier to read the pasted text
• Fix: copy Pantone code to color name
• Fix: browser extension display issue on external websites
• New loading animations

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7. Changes to the Pro✨ Plan

1. We’ve added a higher quality export level for Pro plan users and now exports from the free plan accounts will contain a watermark
2. The image download feature is now a Pro Plan feature
3. For new users, the card limit will be 60 cards. There are no changes to existing users' card limits.
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Note: While GIF files are supported, we will no longer support webp fomat files.

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This week, we have just released a new Sleep Mode on the browser extension for you to control the display of the Save Button that appears on top of images. This would be handy when you're not actively doing research.

When the Save Button is hidden, the extension will still be installed and you can still save images by right-clicking on an image to add it to the panel or use the Save in Bulk option.

We have also improved the extension installation experience.

This week we're releasing a range of improvements across the chrome extension as well as performance upgrade and bug fixes.

Chrome Extension Improvements

• When you collapse the side panel, you can now drag the icon around as you continue to select images across web pages. This will provide more flexibility when you save references at scale.

• When you save images, the side panel would now auto close

• When you create new boards from the extension, hitting Enter after entering the board name would automatically save the images to that board, saving you 1 click.
• To avoid confusion, when you select the extension icon from the extension menu on a web page that has no images, it will now open the side panel or redirect you to the log in page as opposed to having no response.
• After you navigate to the Settings tab in the extension and close the side panel, you'll be redirected back to the main page the next time you open the panel as opposed to being stuck on the Settings page.

Other Improvements on the Web App

• We have added placeholder cards when you upload images that will show you the upload progress. It is also easier for you to know where they're located as they are getting loaded.
• We've added a loading animation and progress bar when you first load a board such that once the board is fully loaded, your experience would be smoother.
• Performance improvement for selecting and deselecting cards, and using Eyedropper to create color cards

🐞 Bug Fixes

• When you upload multiple images and when they finish loading, all the images are now being correctly selected such that you can immediately rearrange them
• Board thumbnails would previously disappeared after you rename a board from the main menu. This has now been resolved.
• Closing the Support Chat previously would bring you to a different part of the canvas. This has now been fixed.
• When you upload a file that is not currently supported, the rest of the images would be correctly uploaded as opposed to the whole batch failing. New notification message has also been added to highlight the impacted file(s).

💖 Improvements

• Improved loading performance of the Pantone library - it's now loading much faster either during your search / when you convert color from Hex/RGB
• Improved performance for the Share popup modal
• Improvement of export preview generation as well as added progress bar for the download
• We've added the feedback survey link to the app which you can find here 👇🏼
  

Other than feedback survey, you can also suggest or vote on new features by clicking Help > Chat with support > Suggest or vote for a feature directly within the app

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🐞 Bug Fixes

• We fixed the issue with downloading images on mac which previously prevented you from viewing the downloaded files properly. It is now behaving correctly across single and multiple image downloads.

• Zooming issues have been fixed where previously when you zoom from 10%, the display would be zoomed into the top left corner of the canvas. This is now behaving correctly to zoom into the center part of the canvas across all methods of zoom - top right zoom menu with zoom % options, + / - zoom icons, keyboard shortcuts and pinching on trackpad to zoom
• Zoom to Fit option is now behaving correctly on public boards
• We also resolved an issue with text editing where previously when you update a duplicated text card, the edited text wasn't saved properly
• We also fixed an issue on the browser extension where the Save button would incorrectly appear in areas when there were no image on some specific websites

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Zoom to fit

This week we released a new Zoom to Fit feature to allow you to easily find the content on your board.

Whenever you refresh your board, by default, we will also display this "zoom to fit" view.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed undo/redo issues on text cards
• Fixed zoom input field issue where the percentage of zoom and the value entered did not match
• Fixed text card issue where you couldn't highlight specific text
• Turning on public shared link from the main menu is now working fine
• Fixed profile picture update issues where consecutive updates were not saved properly
• Fixed UI issues on the pricing plan page for mobile

Spread Out and New Pricing Plan

• New spread out function which gives you one-click layout organization when you select multiple cards. Read more on the different card actions you can do.
• We have also just released a new free plan without any time limit and a new paid tier. Read more details here.

Make the Dot 2.0 - Multiplayer Canvas

We have upgraded the previous canvas with this new infinite canvas to allow for more whitespace to ideate. It also comes with the following capabilities:

• Multiplayer - invited users who have been added to the board can edit simultaneously and see each other's presence
• Zooming in and out of the canvas via trackpad, mouse, keyboard shortcut and button option
• Panning and scrolling the canvas
• Resizing card
• Undo and redo previous actions
• Selection and multi-selection with a corresponding contextual menu for additional functionalities
• Copy and pasting cards via keyboard shortcut and contextual menu
• Change the order of the card - bring to front, bring forward, send to back and send backward
• Improved text editing with more font options

Home Dashboard Improvement

We have just introduced an improvement to the home page to allow sharing and renaming your boards. As we saw that more of you are now navigating between multiple boards, this will hopefully make that easier. Additionally you can now export your boards into PDFs or PNGs.

Public Board Image Zoom

In addition to the home page improvements, we have also just enabled zooming capability for images on public boards.

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Export Your Board

Export your board into PDFs or PNGs when you prefer to save the board as a static file. If you have any GIFs on your board, we recommend sharing as a public link instead.

Bug Fixes

We have also squashed a few bugs:

• When images are not saved properly, it will no longer affect viewing and editing your whole board
• The iPad version of the image preview is now displayed correctly
• After resetting password, you should now be redirected back to the app

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Public Shared Link

We have just introduced a new way of sharing your board via a public link. This means that the person receiving the link can view your board without needing to sign up for a Make the Dot account.

Image Preview

This week we have introduced a new way to preview and download images on Make the Dot - offering more flexibility when you're doing your research. In additional to that, there are new ways to download images - be it a single image or multiple images.

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Now when you open up any of the images on your board, in additional to having the side panel that provides description, source link as well as comments, you will also find an image preview where you see the large version of the image that you've selected. You can easily zoom into the image to get a full-page view to see all the details or scroll through the thumbnails preview below to navigate to other images on the board.

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Image Download

When you invite a collaborator to the board, perhaps they're part of the photography team or marketing intern in charge of your social media, they might need to download the images from the board to create other assets. In this scenario, they can either download a single image directly from the image preview panel or select multiple images from the board and download all of them at once.