Since this release took a bit longer as expected, I thought it might worth a post to share what was going on in the last few weeks in the Shapr3D office.
We were in a rush before the release, and we created huge amount of technical debt in the month before the release. We really wanted to be ready to the launch of the small iPad Pro. Finally we were able to release a pre-final build, but it obviously came with a price in terms of development.
In the last few weeks, we were basically cleaning up code base, to make it ready for new features, but also implemented a few, but really important features.
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Units
In the next release you will be able to select your preferred unit system. Based on your iPad’s settings the default for imperial system will be inch, and millimeter if you are using metric system. You will be able to select mm, cm, m, inch, and foot. When you open an existing workspace that you created with the current version, you will be able to set the unit system for it. However, after you set the unit system for a given workspace, you won’t be able to change it. Changing the default unit system will only affect new workspaces. -
User account management
This is not very exciting, but very important. Subscription data will be stored on our servers, and you will be able to restore it anytime using your account. But we are not going to force registration until you don’t subscribe. Users who already subscribed, will be offered to create a new account when the app launches for the first time. -
Grid improvements
Finally the grid will be visible over faces, so you will be able to use it to precisely position your sketches on faces. -
Hundreds of bugfixes
We have changed about 25% (!) of our code base in the last month, and fixed literally hundreds of bugs and crashes. Before the initial release we had very poor test coverage, now it is decent, but still needs improvements (50-70% of the codebase is now covered with automatic tests). This will help us release new features faster, without breaking existing functionality. -
Sketching improvements
We slightly improved our line/arc recognition algorithm, and also fine tuned the force related stuff. You will have the option to set the required pressure to a lower value, since some users found the required force for sketching too much. We really hope this improvement will provide a much better user experience for them. -
Improvements in tools
We have revisited the workflow of some tools, eg. now you will be able to select multiple parts to revolve etc. We tried to make the flow of the tools more consistent. In some cases (when push/pull operations take long) now we show a progress indicator. That’s * really nice*, since until now Shapr could do some secret operations in the background (eg. calculating the fillet) without notifying the user. Shame on us. At least now this is fixed. Also undo/redo is smoother and faster now.
You can expect this new release by next week, depending on the App Store review process. After this release we will implement the super important layers functionality, and we will release a bunch of tutorials, that will guide you through the basics of Shapr3D.
We are sorry that this release took so long, and we promise that we will release more often in the future, hopefully in every 2-3 weeks. However, we had to do this huge cleanup, and the result is a smoother, faster and far more stable Shapr3D, we hope you will enjoy it.
