v0.2.0

Beta 0.2 Release Notes

This is the second Sketchbook beta release, which includes a number of new features and improvements. Sketchbook has now reached (and exceeded) parity with the legacy prototype, and all creative work from the legacy version has been ported into a fork of the new Sketchbook.

What's New in 0.2

• Presets! Create curated sets of values for your project parameters, and easily switch between them in the app UI. Learn more in the docs.
• Config Annotations for Parameters. You can now specify configuration settings for your parameters with commented annotations, and some config details will be inferred from parameter naming as well. Find more details and examples in the docs.
• Mobile Mode. Sketchbook now offers a narrow-screen mode for mobile web. Mobile Mode currently supports only project and preset selection (not parameter adjustment), but this enables a nicely streamlined UI.
• Shader Art Improvements. Shader art projects have a few new features, including scaledTime uniforms for continuous motion speed adjustments, and #import support. See the docs for more.
• New Project Config Settings. Create non-animated projects in staticMode, avoid the parameterization of specific project properties with ignoreKeys, and more, all listed out in the docs.
• Server Side Rendering. Sketchbook now renders part of the app on the server, for faster load times and improved performance w/ web scrapers. The project navigation panel renders in SSR (with a blank canvas), then the project and project detail panel are loaded on the client.
• Link Preview Support. You can now bundle OpenGraph images and specify other OG metadata for Sketchbook. Find further discussion in the docs.
• Hello World Project. Though most demo projects are still on the demo branch, the main branch now has one "Hello World" project to welcome newcomers, and provide an example of basic Sketchbook usage.
• Quality of Life Improvements. Many subtle tweaks for improved DX. Examples include: dynamic canvas creation on project load (no more shared canvases), new utility fields in the detail object passed to the update function, hex string definitions for numeric array color parameters, and WebGL2 support.
• Performance & Stability. More unit & component tests, bug fixes, style polish, cross-browser testing, and edge-case accommodations have Sketchbook feeling reasonably solid and snappy. More to do here, but progress nonetheless!
• Docs Updates: The Sketchbook Docs provide a coherent and comprehensive overview of Sketchbook's functionality. Changes include improvements to the Quick Start, a roadmap overview in the Beta Notes doc, and many more subtle refinements.

Breaking Changes (0.1 to 0.2)

• Numeric array color styles are now named byteColor and unitColor.
• The time value passed within UpdateDetail is now in seconds (instead of milliseconds).
• The project lifecycle method paramsChanged has been renamed, and now receives an array of changed keys. It is called only once when multiple params are updated (e.g. on preset application), and is no longer called after function parameter invocations, or after asset import.