We've introduced a new Position Constraint called "Scale." When applied, this constraint allows elements to maintain their size relative to the background, which is particularly useful when placing background images and ensuring they cover the entire canvas.
Learn more about the different Position Constraints on our new docs page.
That means you don’t have to reposition an arrow when you move around the element to which it is pointing at. It will automatically adjust its position.
Additionally, we’ve refined the way of adding new arrows or form elements to your snap.
When clicking on the form element button on the top of the editor and choosing the desired element, you can now immediately start drawing on the canvas. This makes it easier to place the element right where you want it.
Video showing how to draw arrows and form elements
From now on, you will see all the colors you have used in the current snap at the top of each color picker. This gives you easy access to all relevant colors.
In addition, we have separated the recently used colors from the preset color palette to make both easier accessible. You can also pin the recently used colors to create your own preferred color palette
Promotion Image showing the color picker improvements
We've improved our image component! Now, you can easily add handpicked dev-icons, emojis, and other icons. Plus, you can easily replace an image while keeping the configured settings on the right toolbar. In the element tree, you'll also see a small preview image for easier orientation.
We’re really proud of this step as it makes our brand more serious.
All possible redirects are in place, so everything should still work as expected. Nevertheless, if you still expect any issues, please don’t hesitate to reach out!
From now on it’s possible to group elements in the tree! 🥳
Grouped elements act like a single element on the canvas. You can move them around and they'll stick together, which can be pretty handy when you want to group several design elements together.
Read more about grouping an other changes regarding the Element Tree on our docs.
Today we released a unified experience for Embedding & Sharing your snaps from a new modal. You're now also able to describe your snap for better SEO.
Hint: Your old snaps are now public by default and accessible by everyone who has the URL. Newly created snaps will be unpublished by default and you have to actively publish them.
Additionally we also unlock this powerful feature for our free plan, so more people can get in touch with it. 🙌
Promotion Image showcasing the new Share & Embed modal
When creating a new snap with snappify, you maybe need different starting points. Like either you want to start with a Blank canvas, or only a code editor.
That’s why we’ve introduced a new Modal for creating snaps, where you can choose the default snap to start with! It also includes a link to our new Template Gallery, if you want to get started with a more sophisticated Templates.
We’d love to hear your feedback about this. Do you maybe have default styles you’d like to be added to this modal or other additions you’d like to see?
Our users on the free plan now have unlimited access to form elements. 🙌
On top of that, we also introduced our first tutorial where we explore how we can leverage those form elements. At the end of the tutorial, we have 3 templates (see the image) that you can copy to your dashboard and customize how you like. 😎
Snapping guidelines is a must for a graphic design tool. But Sometimes you want to position elements freely per drag. Now you can do that! Just hold Ctrl to disable the snapping guideline.
As part of these changes, we also changed how you can multi-select elements on canvas individually. You can either select multiple elements with Shift-Click or per drag-select.
Elements list improvements
We polished the UI of the elements list (left toolbar) and also improved the UX for better distinction of the hover and selected state to the elements.
In addition to existing elements selection by pressing Ctrl and click, we also support selecting multiple elements with Shift-Click.
The context menu got new a new option to “Rename” which is the same as double-click on the element. Also, lock/hide options are added, which can be applied on multi-selection.
Give the element a custom name to keep a better overview. Simply double-click on the label of the element to enter the edit mode. The new name will be saved automatically if you click outside or by hitting ENTER.
They will shrink in size or be centered depending on the screen size. Now there’s nothing which stops you to embed beautiful code explanations on your own website / blog! 🙌
It will be a living documentation and is still not finished, but we’re happy that we have released the first version. If you miss anything specific, please reach out to us via chat.
What’s maybe interesting for you, because it was basically hidden until now, is that we now have docs for our Simple Snap API which lets you automate the creation of your snaps!
This means that you now can specify gradient colors on every element color, doesn’t matter if it’s the text color, code editor color, stroke colors, snap background - no limitations! 😄
Hint: easily paste CSS gradient values in the gradient picker to apply them!
Screenshot showing how to paste CSS gradient values
Promotion Image showcasing the new lock & hide element feature
Lock and Hide elements for a better editing experience on the canvas.
Lock: When an element is locked it becomes not selectable on the canvas so you can’t move it unintentionally.
Hide: When an element is hidden it disappears completely from the canvas. This also means snapping guidelines won’t be applied to this element.
However, in both case, you’ll be able to select the element still on the elements list (left toolbar) and change the properties of the element as usual
Promotion Image showcasing the new ellipse element
The first form element - the ellipse - hast just landed in snappify 🤩
Form elements help you to style your snaps in an even more unique way and we want to add more variants in the upcoming weeks!
Hint: press Shift while resizing an ellipse element to create circles.
Auto generated folders
Promotion Image showcasing the new automatically generated folders
We introduced “automatically generated folders”.
Every time a snap gets generated via the API or the VS Code Extension, it will be stored in the corresponding folder, so those snaps don’t pollute your Root folder anymore. 😄
Of course you can just move the snaps into any other folder afterwards!
Promotion Image showcasing the new tilting feature
Now you can tilt the code-editor, rich-text, profile-info and custom image elements. So you can present your snap in an even cooler way 😎. Just play with the control (2) - you will love it.
In case you already know the exact tilting degree, you can activate the manual editing mode where you can put the values into the input fields.
You’re now able to create dashed or dotted lines and have the ability to customize the start and end markers of each arrow. It’s also possible to choose now marker at all to just draw a simple line.
Have a look on the right toolbar when selecting an Arrow element to see which customizations are possible.
We released some new code window styles to give you more options on how to style your code snippets! 🥳
In order to change the style you have to select a code window and open the “Window Control” accordion on the right toolbar. It’s now also possible to hide the tab completely if you just to want to share a plain code snippet without the window-look.
It’s now possible to upload an image directly from your clipboard. When you have an image in your clipboard and you’re on the snappify Editor, just paste it and it will be uploaded so you can use it right away.
Copy & Paste Elements in the Editor
Another clipboard improvement is that you can now copy & paste the selected elements in the snappify Editor.
Just select the element(s) you want to copy, pess Ctrl + C to copy and then Ctrl + V to paste them again.
This even works across different snaps! So when you have a special group of elements you want to reuse in different snaps, just copy and paste them onto a new snap 🥳
We’ve also prepared a video where you can get a better overview about those new features:
We’re proud to tell you that Pro users are now able to embed their snaps via an iframe.
That means you’re now able to embed an interactive version of your snap into your own website / blog! Additionally users can easily copy the code with a new “Copy” button which is visible when hovering over a snippet.
Screenshot of the new embed export option
Screenshot of the new embed modal
Our next goal is to make snaps easily embeddable into blogging platforms like Medium, dev.to or Hashnode 😎
Closed Beta for the snappify API
We’re also excited to tell you that we launched a closed Beta for the new snappify API! It’s a REST API which takes some configuration parameters and returns a beautifully styled image of your code snippet, like you’re used to from the snappify Editor.
Screenshot of the snappify API in action
We’re still looking for testers, so if you’re interested in giving it a try, pls just write a DM to Dominik and he will send you the instructions.
All our Pro users now have the possibility to share their snaps via a public URL! And the groundbreaking thing here is: it’s not just an image, but an interactive version of your snap, where viewers can easily copy your code snippets!
Promotion Image for the snappify ProductHunt launch
About a year ago we started developing snappify and our goal was to build a tool that makes it easy to create beautiful code snippets, while also provide our users a powerful editor which helps them to annotate and explain their snippets.
We are confident that snappify has grown to be a very helpful tool for developers around the world and therefore it's time to make more people aware of it via ProductHunt. 🙌
Your support definitely makes the difference and we'd be super happy if you check it out on ProductHunt and leave your feedback. 😻
We’ve added a new arrow element which can be super helpful to point out specific areas of your code. You can drag it around and add as many points to it as you wish. Also have a look at the styling possibilities on the right toolbar!
Promotion Image showing the new arrow element
Code Highlightings
Another feature we’re happy to release is Code Highlights.
You can now either “Washout” parts of your code to either blur them or gray them out. This can be helpful if the viewer should focus on specific parts of the code.
Additionally it’s now also possible to show lines as Added or Removed which can be used to emphasize changes in a code snippet.
Promotion Image showing the new code highlightings
Checkout the video below to see both features in action 👇
From today our textarea is not a simple textarea containing only plaintext anymore. It’s now a fully fletched richtext editor, powered by the mighty tiptap editor! Watch the video below to get an overview how it works. 👇
snappify can now be embedded via an iframe
As you might know, snappify is already embedded into other products like FeedHive or ThreadStart via our npm package. But until now, only our old editor was embedded their.
We’re super excited that from today also our new editor ismbeddable via an iframe and is already live on FeedHive and ThreadStart! 🙌
Pro users are now able to set a different font family for their text elements, which gives you even more possibility to customize the images of your code for your own brand. 🙌
Screenshot of the new font families
New image upload modal
When you want to upload an image you’ll now see a fancy new modal where you’re also able to reuse recently uploaded images.
From today it’s possible to sign up / login to snappify with more authentication providers than just Twitter. We’re happy to tell you that you’re now also able to use the following providers:
Google
LinkedIn
Facebook
If there’s another provider you’d like to be added pls contact us.
(Monthly) recurring subscriptions
Until now it was only possible to subscribe to our Pro features by doing a one-time payment for a one-year subscription via Gumroad. We’ve implemented this as a quick solution to enable payments, but of course it wasn’t meant as a long-term solution.
Today we’re happy to announce that we’ve introduced recurring subscriptions via Paddle. Together with that, we additionally introduced monthly subscriptions.
Existing Pro users are able to subscribe via the new subscription model as soon as their initial one-year subscription runs out. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to contact us.
It’s now possible to update your profile info settings. Define an avatar, full name and your username for several platforms which will then be reused in the profile info elements throughout your snaps.
Screenshot of the profile info modal
If you select a profile info element you can choose the platform which should be used for this element on the right toolbar.
We've refactored our code editor to do syntax highlighting with Shiki, a powerful tool which gives us the possibility to create precise syntax highlighting for well-known VS Code themes.
In the future we want to add the possibility to add custom themes and if you're missing a VS Code theme which you'd like to use in snappify, please don't hesitate to contact us so we can add it to our list of themes!
Free-Canvas
From now on the snap is centered on the canvas and can also be moved around by clicking the Scroll-Wheel on your mouse and dragging it around.
Additionally it's now possible to zoom in and out when you press Ctrl + Scroll.
At the same time we could further improve the performance of our editor, which overall results in a very nice UX like you're used to from other design apps like Figma.
Video showing the free canvas
Shortcuts Overview
The snappify editor is getting more powerful over time and for better usability we already have a bunch of shortcuts to ease the process of creating beautiful code snippets.
To get a better overview about all of our shortcuts we introduced a new popover so you can get a nice overview! 🙌
We're working hard on merging our Simple and Pro Editor into one unified editor. And we just released a big step to reach this goal.
Today we introduce a new feature called "Spotlight Element" which allows you to specify one code editor in your snap as a spotlight element.
A spotlight element can't be dragged around manually and is always centered in the middle of the background. If the spotlight elements changes in size (e.g. you add or remove code) then the background will adjust automatically to its size.
If there is a spotlight element, you can't set the height of the background, but the specify the padding to the spotlight element, which will be kept when the spotlight element changes its size (you can also specify no padding at all to just display the code snippet without a background).
You've reached the end of our changelog 😱
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