July 8, 2026

Everything that changed, in detail

A little while back I asked some of you to try the pattern editor and tell me, honestly, what felt off. You did — in real detail, with real patience. Here is everything that changed because of it.

Diagonal lines actually look diagonal. Drawing a line at an angle used to force it into a "staircase" of horizontal and vertical steps, because the tool only ever showed you grid-snapped squares while you dragged. Now the Line, Rectangle, and Ellipse tools show a smooth outline that follows your actual mouse movement — the shape only snaps to stitches once you let go. It sounds small, but it makes drawing anything at an angle feel like drawing, instead of fighting the grid.

Dragging a photo out of Google now works. If you tried dragging an image straight from a Google Photos tab (or almost any other website) into the editor and nothing happened — that wasn't you doing something wrong. Browsers only hand over a link when you drag an image out of another site, not the actual picture, so the editor had nothing to import. It now fetches the image itself when that happens, so the drag-and-drop you'd expect just works. (If the link turns out not to be an image, or the site blocks it, you'll get a clear message instead of nothing at all.)

The Save and Download buttons no longer overlap on a phone. On narrow screens, the pattern name, Save button, and Download button used to crowd into each other and become genuinely hard to tap. The header now wraps sensibly on small screens instead of squeezing everything into one row.

Saved patterns remember which colors you'd hidden. If you hide some colors while stitching — to focus on one thread at a time — that now travels with the pattern when you save it. Reopen it later, on your phone or your computer, and it comes back exactly as you left it.

Downloading a PDF now tells you it's working. The Download PDF button now shows "Downloading…" and disables itself for a moment after you click it, so a slow connection doesn't leave you wondering whether your click registered at all.

None of this happened because I guessed what to fix — it happened because you told me. If something here still isn't quite right, or you've thought of something you wish the editor could do, I'd genuinely love to hear it. Reply to any of my emails, or use the feedback button inside the editor itself.