#36: Updates and Pendulum Art
Hi, welcome to a new month of creative fun.
I spent the last week on holiday, it was the half term break last week in the UK and we have 6(ish) more weeks before the summer holidays.
Every month I try to think about what I have done and I can never remember anything, so I check the changelog and realise that actually I worked on a lot more than I realised.
As I mentioned last month my wife is now helping with the social media (Facebook and Instagram) and because of this she’s finding all sorts of bugs with the apps. I don’t intentionally leave these problems in but having a second pair of eyes definitely helps me to find and fix them.
Thankfully none of these issues are show stoppers, but the continued fixing makes the Brush Ninja website nicer to use for everyone!
Emoji Art Updates
In May I spent some time working on the Emoji Art Editor. It’s a popular app and now has an undo and redo feature. It has long had the ability to share emoji art via a url, and now all of the gallery entries have links to the open and edit each gallery artwork which can be a lot of fun. I also added a whole bunch of new gallery items to the Emoji Art gallery.
Animation Maker Updates
The animation maker also saw some updates. I improved the colour picker so it works better (at all) on touch devices, and added some help information to make it clearer what the different colour picker options do (HSLA).
Related to making the colour picker work better, I made changes to the code to make the main app work better as well. In particular this applies to devices that have both a pointer and touch interface (such as Chromebooks) and will make anything with an overlay (new file, save, export etc) work more reliably.
I reworked the animation saving code to make it consistant with all the other Brush Ninja apps, which in turn has made it work a bit better on iPads.
I also think I may have found the issue with the Google speed score I referred to a couple of months back. I need to wait for Google to update their rankings, which can take months, to find out if it’s worked - but I have my fingers crossed.
New Pendulum Art App
That’s right - new stuff! This isn’t anywhere near as advanced as the other apps on the site, so I added it to the play section but I think it’s really fun. For me personally the pendulum art app acts like a mindfulness thing watching the patterns generate with minimal input. It’s almost hypnotic.
I had the idea for the app and made the first version in one evening, and then I didn’t know where to put it. Eventually I decided to make it a bit more usable and add it to Brush Ninja so everyone could enjoy relaxing artwork creation.
Gallery
As well as the previously mentioned Emoji Art updates there’s also been a bunch of new animation works added to the Brush Ninja gallery. Thanks to everyone who shares on social media!
Thanks!
Thanks for all your continued support with Brush Ninja. Sharing it on social channels and with friends, family and colleagues all goes towards helping me to keep it free and online indefinitely!
Until next month, keep creating!
Ben
