Welcome to the October 2023 release of Magma. From this month onward, we’re transitioning to a monthly release schedule, ensuring you’re always in the loop with the latest brushes and features we paint into the app. Here’s what’s fresh off the easel:

• Text Tool: Introducing the highly anticipated text tool for all your typography needs. Now, you can seamlessly integrate text into your artwork.

• Version History: Keep track of your artwork’s evolution. This feature allows you to revert to previous versions of your drawing.

• Community Hub: Stay updated with the latest news, features, and articles from the Magma team, and introduce engaging content in your own Artspaces

• Bug fixes and other minor improvements

Text Tool

Magma’s text tool is a versatile feature that allows users to seamlessly add text to their canvas. Whether it’s for dialogue in comics, scene signposts, or team feedback, this tool offers intuitive controls for textual integration.

Features:

• Quick Add: Tap to place a default text box or click and drag for custom sizing. Deselecting is as easy as hitting the ESC key or clicking outside the box

• Mobility: Resizing and relocating your text box is straightforward, either with anchor points or by utilizing the move tool

• Text Input: Direct typing is supported, as well as copy-pasting from other sources. (Note: Unsupported fonts will default to Montserrat)

• Editing: Owners of text layers can easily make edits by selecting the desired text box and making changes

• Text Settings: Extensive customization options exist, from font family, size, and style to more intricate settings like line height, letter spacing, and text alignment. Advanced options further enhance user control with features like text scaling, casing adjustments, and even rasterization for turning text into image format

You can learn more in the video below and our Text Tool user manual.

Version History

Magma’s “Version History” feature offers users a systematic approach to managing and preserving the progression of their artwork. By capturing specific moments or iterations of a canvas, artists can easily navigate through different versions, restore previous states, or compare variations.

Key Features:

• Canvas Saving: While Magma conducts periodic auto-saves of your canvas, users can save specific artwork stages or variations manually through the File menu’s “Save to Version History” option.

• Retention Period: Magma’s auto-save system ensures availability of versions from every hour in the past day, every day in the past week, every week in the past month, and every month in the previous year

• Bookmarking: Given the limited retention of auto-saved versions, users can bookmark important ones, ensuring they’re retained beyond the usual auto-save cycle

• Action Menu: Each saved version offers multiple actions including previewing, reverting, duplicating, downloading, exporting, and deletion

• Restoration: Using the “Revert” action, users can effortlessly return to previous versions, with the current version saved automatically to prevent data loss

• Permissions: Only the canvas owner can access the version history in their Artdesk. However, in Artspaces where one is an admin, version history permissions can be tailored for each member’s role, ranging from viewing to revision management

Version History is available for all users, although on on free plan (Spark) is is limited to last 7 days.

You can learn more in the video below and our Version History user manual.

Community Hub

The Magma Community Hub, located beneath your Artesk and Artspaces, is our latest initiative to centralize essential resources. This hub showcases a collection of instructional videos and articles curated by the Magma Team, covering basics for newcomers and in-depth topics for seasoned users.

A highlight of the hub is our range of content sections, including the Getting Started videos, the Docs on articles detailing essential features of Magma, and our live events sections which encompass weekly live-streams across platforms like YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook. These streams introduce series such as Magma Classroom and Magma Clubhouse. Past educational sessions are archived in the Magma Classroom, allowing users to review or even participate in the actual Artspaces where events transpired.

Community HUB is also where Releases page is being hosted, provided you with the information about every release which you’re browsing through right now.

Content Pages in Artspaces

Magma’s content pages are designed for Artspace admins to communicate essential news and share valuable resources with their community, akin to Magma’s own Community Hub. The beauty of these pages lies in their versatility - they allow to host useful content posts right next to your project folders:

• Link: Share external websites

• Video: YouTube links, whether they’re artist interviews or tutorials, are easily embeddable

• Article: Share your own insights and updates directly within Magma

Another distinctive feature is the option to ‘publish as a modal’. This ensures that, upon their next log in, Artspace members are immediately greeted with the latest content in a pop-up window, ensuring visibility.

Please visit this article for more details.

Notable fixes

• Resolved the issue of incorrect brush/pencil coordinates during multiple strokes combined with paste/paintbucket data actions

• Transitioning between teams is now smoother

• Fixed the anomalies experienced when opening and closing drawings

• Resolved issues related to moving the text tool layer and its interaction with touch devices

Thank you

We’re committed to enhancing your experience with every update. Your feedback drives our improvements, so don’t hesitate to share your thoughts, ideas and suggestions with us!

Excited about what’s next?

Become a Magma insider by joining our Pyro’s Squad Artspace. Get a sneak peek into beta features before they make their grand debut!