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Mood Board Update

I just spent the weekend working on nothing but Mood Board. It’s an application that helps you quickly put together concept documentation for creative projects like jewelry, paintings, illustration, concept art, weddings and pretty much any kind of project where style or visual look development is important.

I’ve been meaning to get a bunch of updates done for a while but I’ve let other projects take precedence and that just isn’t right. So without further ado, here are a list of the changes that went to Apple for approval today:

• (Fixed) Image sorting when adding new assets to your Boards. This means that new materials will always be at the top of your stack in the document, ready for you to move into position as you see fit. It also inadvertently means that assets stay “in order” more reliably.
• (Fixed) the crashing bug reported from users attempting to drag images directly from the new “modal” google image search results into a board. This was caused by my erroneous assumption that the urls posted to the clipboard by Safari (ne. google) would actually be sane strings. Short answer, they are nothing like what you’d consider to be an actual url.
• (Feature) Added the ability to pan the view. This is done using two-finger scrolling on the trackpad. Implementation should work similarly on any supported device for multi-touch input. (I’m working out how this should function for non-standard devices, would love to hear from users if this is a big issue.)
• (Fixed) Export and Edit Node were conflicting on Command+E. Export is now (the more standard) Command+Shift+E while edit remains Command+E.
• (Feature) Implemented the ability to zoom into boards. This is a pretty big feature and I am almost positive that we’ll be revisiting this. When you bring in assets at native scale we should be able to up-sample those assets while you’re zooming so that if you have the resolution in an asset you get to see more detail. Whether or not this is happening natively is hard to tell because my display is higher resolution and everything pretty much always looks awesome.
• (Fixed) The scale tool now responds in the way you’d expect a state-ful tool to act. Instead of snapping to min-scale when you drag in either direction, scaling now only offsets the current asset scale making things feel far more natural. While I’d agree that Mood Board doesn’t scale things normally (always from the bottom right edge?!) this is for a reason that should be come more clear in the next update.
• (Feature) I’ve improved rendering performance by almost 30% so even boards containing large numbers of assets should render more quickly. The background plane is now ready for you to be able to assign custom art and overload the color selection models to be able to produce exactly the kind of board you want.
• (Feature) I’ve also implemented a new color selection setting called “Most Unique” This works by calculating the average of all selected assets and then picking from that set the one color that most deviates from the selected average. If you work with pictures of jewelry this is really going to help you find better background colors to let you focus on your overall color-styles. If you had a silver band with a colored gem in a setting, shot on a white background; you would get the color the gem almost every time in your board background selection.

This is a really huge update and I’m proud of what I’ve done here. I feel kind of bad about the time it took to get this update out but I think it was worth the wait.