What’s new on Ludus?

Better lines

Lines have been completely revamped. They are now much easier to select, they can be scaled when they’re in the active selection, they are highlighted when they’re in a group selection. Oh, and also: the arrow size is now completely independent from the line width.

Dotted strokes on all shapes!

You can now set dotted or dashed strokes to your lines, arrows, circles, and rectangles.

Ludus as a desktop app?

Ludus is now a Progressive Web Application! When you’re in Ludus, from the Chrome browser menu, you can now see “Install Ludus” (see attached screencast). Ludus is online first and will always be but we plan to progressively offer more offline capabilities to the product. This is a first step towards having a real desktop experience for Ludus.

On OSX, Google will save the app in a default place but you can then move it wherever you want. It will have also have its own (cleaner) window, same as other desktop applications.

Export as URL file

If you’re a file lover, you can now download your presentation as a URL file, allowing you to attach it to an email or store it on your favorite cloud storage solution (Dropbox or Google Drive for example).

Slide manager is now resizable
(and always visible)

The slide manager is now visible by default when you open the editor but it is now resizable. Resizing that panel was a much-needed feature and we’re glad that it’s now available for everyone.

Notes in editor

In addition to the previous point, notes are now also available in the editor! Notes used to be only editable in the speaker view but that was a kinda weird behavior, especially since it’s expected to find the notes at the place where we can edit the slides. This is fixed now.

Better resizing/snapping

Text can now be wrapped per character, which can be super handy in some cases. You can also group resize texts horizontally, which means you can resize multiple texts at once, and resizing a text or a shape is also way easier. On top of that, we made guideline snapping working when resizing text horizontally. The previous behavior could sometimes be super frustrating. Little details to make your life easier!

Inter font

We added the Inter font by Rasmus Andersson. Just because we love it.

Bug fixes and performance improvements

We also fixed many things, and improved others. Here are the details.

• We globally improved the performances of the editor. It now uses less memory and we solved memory leaks that could make the editor become very slow after using it for a relatively long time.
• We solved a bug with existing tags not suggested by default in the dropdown when creating a new presentation or Smart Block.
• We fixed a bug with old Smart Blocks that could make the editor crash.
• The rendering of shapes that have blend modes and transparency is now much more consistent between the editor and the viewer.
• We updated to the latest Lottie player and fixed old Lottie JSON files that could block the editor (black slide).
• GIFs are now rendered in a more efficient way in Chrome (via WebP) and the latest version of Safari (via H.264-encoded video).
• GIFs are also loading much faster in the editor now (we only load static images out of them).
• We upgraded Icons8 API to v4, it should be faster now.

That’s it for now!