Locus Studio 0.3.51 (Beta 3)

Locus Studio 0.3.51 - Beta 3

Third public beta: fourteen releases since Beta 2, and 151 closed issues. The app also has a new icon. Most of what follows came out of drawing with the app rather than from a plan, which is why the list is as long as it is.

About the number. Beta 3 is 0.3.51, not 0.4.0. A new beta stage has meant a new middle number since Beta 2; this once it does not, and Beta 3 sits at the top of the 0.3.x range instead. Beta 4 will be 0.4.0, and the rule resumes there. 0.3.15 through 0.3.50 are numbers that never existed: the jump is what marks the stage.

Downloads

• macOS (Intel + Apple Silicon): Locus.Studio_0.3.51_universal.dmg
• Windows 10/11 (64-bit): Locus.Studio_0.3.51_x64-setup.exe
• SHA256SUMS.txt - verify a download with shasum -a 256 -c SHA256SUMS.txt (macOS) or certutil -hashfile <file> SHA256 (Windows)

Both installers are code-signed: Developer ID signed and notarized on macOS, and a signed installer on Windows. Windows SmartScreen did not appear on this build, though a machine that has never seen Locus Studio may still ask you to confirm the publisher; if it does, choose More info then Run anyway.

They are smaller than Beta 2's as well: stale build output that had been riding along is gone, about 40 MB of it on macOS and 9 MB on Windows.

A new app icon

Drawn separately at each size rather than scaled down from one image, so it stays legible small - in the Dock, in the app switcher, in the taskbar and at list size.

New in the model window

Drawing

• Regular Polygon, three tools: by an edge, from the center to a vertex, or from the center to an edge midpoint. Each remembers its side count, and every corner the tool invents is a derived point, so dragging a driver keeps the shape regular instead of shearing it.
• Paint Region - fill you drag. Hover lights the face under the cursor, a drag lights every face it crosses, and release makes one live fill whose inner walls drop out. With one fill selected, Shift-drag adds faces to it and Alt-drag takes them out.
• Line: Tangent to Two Circles - up to four of them: the two outer, which keep both circles on the same side, and the two inner, which pass between them. All four are ghosted and the cursor picks. Line: Tangent to Circle now ghosts both of its answers the same way instead of choosing silently.
• Point: Center of Circle gives each selected circle a center point: its own when it was drawn from one, otherwise a derived point that tracks it.
• Split Curves (Combine) cuts every curve at its exact intersections, arcs staying arcs, near misses left alone.
• Reverse Direction flips which way a curve runs. A segment swaps its ends; an arc swaps its ends and its sweep, since swapping alone takes the long way round; a region and a boolean wind the other way.

Seeing what you have

• Actual Size (View menu) sets the zoom so one model millimeter is one millimeter of glass, and Ctrl/Cmd+0 now runs it in the model window. The app asks the system what size your monitor really is, rather than assuming the 96 dpi the web platform does. Preferences > Interface > Screen calibration shows what it was told, where the number came from, and a bar you can stretch against a ruler if it is wrong. A calibration is remembered per monitor.
• Show Curve Direction and Show Region Direction (View menu) draw chevrons along each curve, and around each region boundary, pointing the way it runs. Both are three-state: off, the selection only, or everything.
• Stroke placement, cap and join. A stroke now says where it sits relative to the true path (on, inner, outer), how an open end stops (round, butt, projecting) and how a corner turns (round, miter, bevel, with a miter limit). All three are cosmetic: geometry, booleans, snapping and picking keep the true path.
• A point is drawn according to what your hand can do with it: a solid disc for a free point, a ring with a center dot for one that slides along something, a hollow ring for one you cannot place yourself.

Getting around

• Select Parents and Select Children walk one step up or down a construction and add to the selection; press again to climb another step. Return or a blank right-click repeats the step, which is how you reach the roots.
• Unhide All shows everything hidden at every level, in one undo step.
• A circle's divisions have an origin and turn as a ring: drag or arrow-nudge any one of them and the whole ring turns, still equally spaced.
• Object names are three letters now, in all seven languages: Seg1 Cir1 Arc1 Int1, German Str1 Kre1 Bog1 Sch1. Nothing in an existing file is renamed by itself, and Update Object Names in the command palette brings an older file across.
• The Data menu's thirty-seven items became thirty across five flyouts - Measure, Numbers, Lists, Select and Clean up - with the seven that belonged to none moved to menus where they do.
• Revert to Saved is in the File menu inside the window, not only in the menu bar, and the three Dimension tools are under Draw in both.
• Right-clicking a modeling command opens that command's own help page. Twenty-two commands had been opening their menu's page while a page of their own existed.
• A label selects and drags with its corners. A guide snaps to realized geometry, and lies along a shape's flat side as well as through its corners. A coordinate typed mid-gesture reaches the command that is waiting for it, as one undo step rather than two.

New in the node editor

• Explode, one node, whose sockets are whatever made the shape: a circle drawn from a center and a point gives those two points back, and the same circle drawn from a center and a radius gives a point and a number. A group opens one layer at a time. The six per-type Explode nodes are retired.
• Compare asks a question about a number - A against B, the operator from a pulldown, true or false out - and Select by Condition splits geometry on that answer into Selected and Unselected. Both read lists element for element.
• The six shape generators with corners hand back region, edges and points, each grouped per shape, so a square comes apart into the four segments you can grab in the model window.
• Parameters as sockets. A node can expose its parameters per instance, so a Slider's range can be computed upstream instead of living only in its dialog. The socket and its field are two views of one value, not two copies that can disagree.
• Vector Math does add, subtract, scale, normalize, dot and cross, chosen on the body the way Math's operation is. Math gains Absolute Value.
• Polygon became Region: Points and Region: Curves. Region: Points depends on the order of its points; Region: Curves joins by matching ends and does not care. Existing documents and help links are untouched.
• Move takes a segment as its vector: a segment is a displacement with base and tip built in, so only its direction and length count, not where it sits.
• Pressing a wired input socket unplugs that wire and hands it to you still attached at its source: drop it on another input to replug, on nothing to disconnect. Alt-press keeps the old behavior.
• Preview is an endpoint rather than something to wire through, and selecting one highlights the geometry it holds in the model window, including when it is switched to not visible.
• The node canvas pans when a drag reaches its edge, a marquee keeps its anchor over the point you started from while it does, and a node lying over another node's switch takes the click instead of letting it through.

Export

• Group by Outline Color gives each outline color its own layer in the exported file, instead of the panel group or the node a shape was drawn under. Every layer number is unique, one color has one spelling, and an object whose shapes span colors keeps its blocks.
• Stroke cap and join are written into both SVG and DXF, with the miter limit, so the same corner cannot spike on screen and bevel in the file.
• A reference export is checked against five independent parsers and fails if any of them reads it differently from the others.

Fixes worth knowing about

• Large drawings. The cleanup tolerance inside the boolean kernels follows the size of the drawing now, which is where sliver artifacts on large work came from. Nothing under a 100 mm diagonal changes at all.
• Booleans. A circle subtracted from a shape came back added to it. A shape subtracted from a copy of itself left a sliver roughly its perimeter long. Both are fixed.
• Offset. A run of segments drawn end to end is one stroke, so the corners between them get joins instead of being ignored - a square drawn as four segments no longer offsets as four separate lines. A sharp tip comes to a point at every distance rather than being cut flat. Corner None leaves its corners empty instead of drawing as a bevel.
• Dedupe compares shapes rather than the pieces a boolean cut them into, and sees past a subdivided edge: a tiling with 183 copies at 61 places reduces to 61 at every tolerance.
• Crossings. Points: Intersection finds the point where a line is tangent to a circle by construction, which used to depend on which of the two circles you asked. The weave's crossing count no longer swings with its tolerance, and when it finds no crossings it says whether the curves never cross or were never split.
• Speed. Connecting an arrayed tile to Realize froze the window for eight seconds, all of it the Layers panel rebuilding once per object minted. It produces no long task at all now, and Auto Region, Fill and Split followed.
• Windows. The menu bar is edited in place rather than replaced, so both canvases no longer jump about 30 px on every focus change and every docked-pane click. Copy, Paste and Duplicate follow the physical key, so they fire on non...

Locus Studio 0.3.0 (Beta 2)

Locus Studio 0.3.0 — Beta 2

Second public beta: eleven days of daily use since Beta 1, worked into new tools, new nodes, seven languages, and a long list of fixes.

Downloads

• macOS (Intel + Apple Silicon): Locus.Studio_0.3.0_universal.dmg
• Windows 10/11 (64-bit): Locus.Studio_0.3.0_x64-setup.exe
• SHA256SUMS.txt — verify with shasum -a 256 -c SHA256SUMS.txt (macOS) or certutil -hashfile <file> SHA256 (Windows)

Both installers are code-signed: Developer ID signed and notarized on macOS; a signed installer (publisher: Blossom Merz) on Windows, where SmartScreen may still ask you to confirm the publisher while the certificate builds reputation.

New in the model window

• Circle: Apollonius — a circle tangent to any three of point, line, circle or arc; every solution is shown and you pick one. Circle Tangent to… — centre, then the object to touch.
• Auto Region — every enclosed face of the selected curves becomes a live region in one command.
• Align & Distribute — six aligns, distribute by centre or by gap.
• Labels — a text box anchored to two points, with size, bold/italic, underline, strikethrough, alignment and colour; exports to SVG.
• Alignment Snaps (View menu, off by default) — dotted lines when you are level with another point, with the cursor snapping onto them and onto anything they cross.
• Object names follow the language — two-letter prefixes per kind (Sg1, Ci1, In1); Update Object Names in the command palette brings an older file across.
• Nodes menu — the node editor is Docked, in a Separate Window, or Closed; remembered across launches.
• Right-click Help on every menu item; status-bar messages in their own zone; guides nudge with the arrows; Divide over a whole selection; the new-file view and default style are the same every time.

New in the node editor

• Bounding Box, Blur, Switch, Oblique Grid, Circle: Apollonius, Circle Tangent to… nodes; Grid and Tri Grid take lattice vectors from the drawing.
• Auto Mirror and Auto Array library clusters, built on the bounding box so copies land flush.
• Math gains Round, Floor, Ceiling, Min, Max, Square Root, Sine, Cosine; colour lists and a random pick from them; Style takes a field or a list for stroke width.
• Inspect: keyboard navigation of the read-out; Convert to Nodes handles dimensions and tangent circles.

Languages

English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Turkish and European Portuguese, with the full Help in each. Changing the language keeps your drawing.

Export

• SVG keeps each shape's own stroke width and text styling; Hairline export still flattens everything for a cut file.

Fixes worth knowing about

• Intersection points no longer freeze when a construction is moved a long way in one step.
• Weld Seams works on tiles drawn as line work, not only regions.
• Two-window mode: menu commands run in the window in front; selections and themes stay in step.
• Many more: see the closed issues on the tracker between September 5 and 16.

Activation

Locus Studio runs without a license, but saving and exporting need a beta license key. In the app, open the activation dialog, copy your machine ID, and email it to the address shown there. You'll get a key to paste back. Keys are tied to one machine; ask if you need to move to another.

Beta License Agreement

Effective September 5, 2026, unchanged since Beta 1. It is shown on first launch and must be accepted to run; it is also under Help ▸ License Agreement.

Feedback

File issues at https://github.com/blossommerz/locus-hub/issues — one issue per bug, with the steps to reproduce and, if you can, the .locus file.

Locus Studio 0.2.0 (Beta 1)

Locus Studio 0.2.0 — Beta 1

First public beta of Locus Studio: compass-and-straightedge constructions, a full visual-programming node graph, wallpaper-group tiling, robust booleans and offsets, and laser-ready SVG/DXF export.

Downloads

• macOS (Intel + Apple Silicon): Locus Studio_0.2.0_universal.dmg
• Windows 10/11 (64-bit): Locus Studio_0.2.0_x64-setup.exe
• SHA256SUMS.txt — verify with shasum -a 256 -c SHA256SUMS.txt (macOS) or certutil -hashfile <file> SHA256 (Windows)

Signed builds

• macOS: the app is Developer ID signed and notarized by Apple. It opens with a normal double-click.
• Windows: the installer is code-signed (publisher: Blossom Merz). Because the certificate is new, SmartScreen may still show "Windows protected your PC" for a while — click More info and confirm the publisher reads Blossom Merz, then Run anyway. This warning fades as the app builds reputation.

Activation

Locus Studio runs without a license, but saving and exporting need a beta license key. In the app, open the activation dialog, copy your machine ID, and email it to the address shown there. You'll get a key to paste back. Keys are tied to one machine; ask if you need to move to another.

Beta License Agreement

Effective September 5, 2026. It is shown on first launch and must be accepted to run; it is also under Help ▸ License Agreement.

New since the last internal build

• Auto Region node: every enclosed region from a pile of crossing curves, in one node.
• Group by Shape node: sort regions into groups of the same shape, with Mirror and Angle switches; groups feed Item at Index.
• Inspect shows list groups with their members.
• Preferences reorganized into sections; dialogs and menus follow the light and dark theme.
• Many fixes across the Beta v1 milestone (see the issue tracker).

Feedback

File issues at https://github.com/blossommerz/locus-hub/issues — one issue per bug, with the steps to reproduce and, if you can, the .locus file.