Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005

It's been a busy day.

You can find out what's new in VoodooPad 2.5 here, or view the complete release notes. You can also download b1 from the latest builds page.

But I don't want to talk about VoodooPad, I want to talk about FlySketch.

The FlySketch 1.6 release is a little odd for me, since there is only one new feature (there are bug fixes as well of course), but I thought it was important to do. FlySketch will now let you take pictures of the menu bar and the menu items when they are pulled down.

It does this with a new screenshot key which behaves quite a bit like cmd-shift-4 would (which is built into the OS). It makes a picture of the whole screen, and then lets you crop out exactly what selection you'd like to put on the canvas. Unsurprisingly, this new hotkey is cmd-shift-5 (you can change that in the prefs to something else if you prefer). You can also hold down the command key while hitting the camera icon to take a screenshot this way.

I like to think of this new feature as a bridge to what I want to do in FlySketch 2.0. I also want a little bit of feedback for my 2.0 idea... which is getting rid of the floating window that everything happens in, and put everything in a regular window.

One of the reasons FlySketch doesn't handle multiple documents open at the same time is because of this floating window- it would just get way to confusing to have multiple canvases hanging out over all windows. So by getting rid of that feature, I'll be able to do multiple documents in a sane way.

But I'm sort of torn about this, because I feel like FlySketch will lose some of it's novelty. I kind of like the way everything is packed in there, and floating above all the windows and being able to sketch with transparency and moving the window around and such. I of course have ideas to make up for this... but it's still sort of uncomfortable for me.

So I'm curious- what does everyone else think about this idea? You can email me, or leave a comment. Whatever you prefer.

And here's the download page for 1.6b, and the (tiny) release notes:

http://flyingmeat.com/flysketch/latest.html

• FlySketch will now put pdf and tiffs on the pasteboard for use in the application services menu.
• New full screen shots, which will also take pictures of menus. Invoked via holding down the command key when hitting the camera button, or cmd-shift-5 (which may be changeable in the prefs if you don't like that)
• Fixed a bug on export where the file extension of .png was given when no file extension was given in the export panel.
• Fixed a bug where the stroke size was lost when switching to the highlighter and back.
• Fixed a bug where a single click with the freehand tool would not draw a single dot.

-- posted 7:52 pm