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Growly Draw Changelog

What's new in Growly Draw 1.5.7

Dec 5, 2023
  • In rare circumstances the font of a text object could not be set when you opened a file, so the text would end up as Helvetica 12. Draw can now recover from this, if the font exists on your computer.

New in Growly Draw 1.5.6 (Nov 7, 2023)

  • Bug fixes:
  • You could not set background color on text: it changed the text color instead.
  • If the first character of text on a polygon required font substitution (such as ➤, which doesn’t exist in Helvetica Neue), the rest of the text was drawn upside down.

New in Growly Draw 1.5.5 (Sep 6, 2023)

  • Bug fixes:
  • When you right-clicked the fill or line color on the info bar in a painting to get the context menu, Set Swap Color was not enabled, but it should have been. I missed that last time.

New in Growly Draw 1.5.4 (May 14, 2023)

  • Bug fixes:
  • When you right-clicked the swap color on the info bar in a painting to get the context menu, Set Fill Color was not enabled, but it should have been.

New in Growly Draw 1.5.3 (Jan 5, 2023)

  • Bug fixes:
  • Clicking in a color swatch in the format panel (to bring up the color panel) could crash in very rare cases.

New in Growly Draw 1.5.2 (Nov 15, 2022)

  • Enhancements:
  • You can resume drawing a polygon that has been finished with Drawing→Resume Drawing Polygon.
  • Bug fixes:
  • Two fixes for rotated shapes: Drawing→Align and Painting→Convert to Painting now take the rotation into account. Previously you could get wrong results for rotated shapes.

New in Growly Draw 1.5.1 (Jun 26, 2022)

  • Bug fixes:
  • Colors chosen from the color picker were not recorded properly, so the color you got wasn’t exactly what you asked for.

New in Growly Draw 1.5 (Jun 16, 2022)

  • Enhancements:
  • Draw now requires Mac OS 10.10 Yosemite or later.
  • In 1.4 the default for scribbles, polygons, and bent lines was changed to always scale the line width when scaling the shape. You can now change this option in the format panel.
  • Bug fixes:
  • The “Reset to selection tool” preference did not work with polygons.

New in Growly Draw 1.4.6 (Feb 15, 2022)

  • Bug fixes:
  • A recent change made it impossible to change the color of shadows on shapes.

New in Growly Draw 1.4.5 (Feb 6, 2022)

  • Enhancements:
  • There’s a new shortcut for zooming to a specific value. Type ⌘1 to zoom to 100%, ⌘2 for 200%, and so on. These activate menu items on the View→Zoom By % submenu.
  • Bug fixes:
  • When you moved shapes in the drawing using the arrow keys, the format panel was not updated.

New in Growly Draw 1.4.4 (Jul 7, 2021)

  • Enhancements:
  • EMF files (Windows Enhanced MetaFiles) can be opened. Due to a shortage of sample files there are a lot of features of EMF not yet supported. If you have any conversion problems, please send us the file.
  • A new command, File→Convert to PDF, converts a file from its original format to PDF without opening it into a document first. Some files (especially certain EMF files) produce better results this way than by opening them directly.

New in Growly Draw 1.4.3 (May 20, 2021)

  • Enhancements:
  • HEIC files (created by the cameras of recent-model iPhones) can be opened using File→Open or by dragging them to the Draw icon. You can also save to that format, which provides smaller file size for the same quality relative to JPEG. HEIC support was added to Mac OS in 10.13 High Sierra, so on earlier systems Draw can’t save to HEIC. Please note that the first save for an HEIC file after you open it uses File→Save As so you can specify the desired quality.
  • New commands, Drawing→Order Above Selection and Order Below Selection, move all selected shapes above or below the last selected shape. This makes it easy to get the precise layering you want in complex drawings.

New in Growly Draw 1.4.2 (Mar 16, 2021)

  • Enhancements:
  • The Favorite Colors popup menu (used in several places in the format panel) has some improvements.
  • You can copy and paste colors between shapes or fields.
  • You can see the RGB values for the current color.
  • The popups are now labeled ★ instead of ✔.
  • The Polygon section of the format panel shows a close approximation of the length of the shape.
  • Bug fixes:
  • Paintings that used a mask (had transparency) were incredibly slow to work with above 100% zoom when the background checkerboard was turned on.

New in Growly Draw 1.4.1 (Feb 17, 2021)

  • Enhancements:
  • Saving to SVG is improved. Draw records the size of the image, so that Safari and other SVG readers will display it properly.

New in Growly Draw 1.4.0 (Jan 5, 2021)

  • Enhancements:
  • Support for macOS 11 Big Sur.
  • Draw runs natively on Apple Silicon in new Macs.
  • Draw now supports files, for both reading and writing.
  • A new kind of shape is available: bent lines. They can be reshaped like polygons, with angles or curves, but they can also have arrows on either end.
  • Grouped shapes can be rotated.
  • You can align shapes to other shapes while dragging them. See .
  • Reshaping for a custom polygon, a scribble, or a bent line.
  • You can align points to other points in the shape. For curved polygons or bent lines, you can only align the vertices, not the control points. See .
  • If a polygon’s control point lies directly on top of the associated vertex, clicking on either will move the control point instead of the vertex. Previously there was no way to separate them once this happened.
  • Draw autosaves your files periodically to a backup file, so if the app or the system crashes you can retrieve at least some of your work. You can turn this off in Preferences.
  • A new preference causes the current tool to change to the selection tool every time you create a new shape other than text.
  • When adding a mask to an opaque painting, the transparency display options are reset to the default, most useful settings.
  • When scribbles, polygons, and bent lines are scaled, the line width is scaled also.
  • Custom polygons used to require three points; if you finished creating one and it had fewer than three points Draw would reject the shape. The minimum number of points is now two.
  • The maximum corner radius on rounded rectangles has been increased from 72 points to 100 points.
  • Bug fixes:
  • The text property panel for adding text to polygons and scribbles had color options that did nothing. (The color of the text comes from the line color for the polygon). Underline also had no effect. These useless options have been removed, but just for these shapes, not for normal text.

New in Growly Draw 1.3.4 (Aug 19, 2020)

  • When working in the painting on Mac OS 10.15 Catalina, the cursor kept changing back to an arrow, which made some of the tools very difficult to use. The cursor is now forced to the proper shape whenever you move the mouse in the painting.
  • Pasting or moving selected pixels in a painting, followed by an operation such as Invert or Shrink to Fit, did not set undo properly.
  • When selecting in a painting, you could not select the last pixel on the right or the bottom.
  • When text was more than one line, certain fonts in certain sizes would not draw the last line.
  • Starting on Mac OS 10.15 Catalina, the “Original Folder” button in the Save As dialog didn’t work due to pointless changes in the OS. On 10.15 and later that button no longer appears. For all versions of Mac OS, hold down the option key when you look at the File menu to see “Save As to Original Folder,” which defaults to showing the folder in which the file currently resides.

New in Growly Draw 1.3.3 (May 6, 2020)

  • Opening very large PDF files could cause problems if the scaling you used last time was too large. There is now an upper limit to how much you can scale up, but even extremely large images can be imported at 100%.
  • PDF files can have a different size for each page. Draw now handles that properly when importing the file.
  • When you pasted an image to a drawing and it extended below the bottom of the window, the scroll bars weren’t updated so you could scroll down to see it all.
  • If the window tab preference specified that all new windows be merged into tabs, and you opened more than one file at a time, some of them became separate windows instead.

New in Growly Draw 1.3.2 (Feb 7, 2020)

  • Save and Save As were broken on Mac OS 10.15 Catalina. Apple changed the way the magic worked and I didn’t catch it.

New in Growly Draw 1.3.1 (Feb 5, 2020)

  • Enhancements:
  • When you change either the fill or line color in a painting, the other is changed as well to make it clear that the same color is used for both.
  • Bug fixes:
  • When you change the scale of a polygon, scribble, or painting, the scaling percentage is not saved—Draw just adjusts the size of the shape. The actual scaling value that results may not be exactly the same as what you entered due to rounding errors, especially on small shapes, and previously Draw did not show the resulting value. Now it does.

New in Growly Draw 1.3 (Dec 12, 2019)

  • Dark mode and accent colors are supported.
  • The app is “notarized,” which means that Mac OS 10.15 will run it without complaint.
  • Painting→Adjust Color allows you to modify the tint of all or part of the painting.
  • Bug fixes:
  • In the Save dialog on Mac OS 10.15 Catalina, selecting a different file type from the popup menu didn’t change the file extension.

New in Growly Draw 1.2.7 (Nov 20, 2018)

  • Enhancements:
  • When creating or reshaping polygons and scribbles, the outline is shown even if you haven’t set one, in order to make it easier to see the shape you’re working on.
  • New preferences:
  • Turning off scale grab dots prevents the grab dots (used to resize shapes) from zooming along with the document. This makes it easier to manipulate shapes that are small or close together at high magnification. The option affects only zoom values greater than 100%.
  • Turning off show recent colors leaves more room for your favorite colors on the format bar.
  • Bug fixes:
  • Attempting to change the font using the Format Panel didn't always work; some fonts would be converted to Helvetica.
  • Drawing→Bring Forward could crash.
  • When reshaping a scribble or polygon, if the last point was within the tolerance value of the first one, it might be deleted.
  • The format panel didn’t display properly on Mac OS 10.14 Mojave. There were a few other display glitches associated with the new OS as well.

New in Growly Draw 1.2.6 (Nov 20, 2018)

  • Enhancements:
  • A new preference allows Draw window tabbing to override the default behavior, always tabbing or never. Tabbing now works for new untitled documents as well.
  • A new command, Draw→Check for GrowlyBird News, will automatically check for news on our website (updates or new products) and let you know when new information is available. This makes it easy to watch for changes to your favorite GrowlyBird apps.
  • Bug fixes:
  • When scrolling in a painting with a mask, sometimes the checkerboard background wasn’t drawn on the exposed area.

New in Growly Draw 1.2.5 (Mar 7, 2018)

  • Enhancements:
  • Dragging around on the color wheel adds only one color to the recent color list instead of hundreds.
  • Improved problem logs for Mac OS 10.12 and later.
  • Bug fixes:
  • It was not possible to delete a favorite gradient.

New in Growly Draw 1.2.4 (Feb 5, 2018)

  • Enhancements:
  • Obscure errors produce better logging.
  • Bug fixes:
  • A linear gradient with an angle of zero was not saved or copied properly; the angle was reset to 180.
  • Using the up and down arrow keys in the help topic list could jump to the wrong topic.

New in Growly Draw 1.2.3 (Feb 5, 2018)

  • Enhancements:
  • When opening .icns files, the largest available icon is selected. Previously it was uncertain which image would be loaded, and it was rarely the largest one.
  • More very old picture files (Quickdraw) can be opened successfully.
  • Improvements to help.
  • Bug fixes:
  • When printing, if the “force drawing onto one page” option was turned on, the drawing wasn’t always centered on the page.
  • Other minor fixes.

New in Growly Draw 1.2.2 (Nov 30, 2017)

  • Enhancements:
  • A new option for paintings allows you to control the opacity; anything less than 100% is partially transparent.
  • Reshaping polygons is even more precise: it’s easier to get the correct control point when two are close together, and the grabber for vertices shows its position more accurately.
  • Bug fixes:
  • In the drawing, selecting a shape and clicking the line or fill color swatch on the format bar could change the shape’s color; it should have just reported the current color without changing it.
  • If you had too many favorite colors to show at once on the format bar and you scrolled them, you couldn’t select the first scrolled color.
  • In paintings, it wasn’t possible to select the last pixel at the right or bottom of the image.

New in Growly Draw 1.2.1 (Nov 30, 2017)

  • Enhancements:
  • A new option for paintings allows you to control the opacity; anything less than 100% is partially transparent.
  • Reshaping polygons is even more precise: it’s easier to get the correct control point when two are close together, and the grabber for vertices shows its position more accurately.
  • Bug fixes:
  • In the drawing, selecting a shape and clicking the line or fill color swatch on the format bar could change the shape’s color; it should have just reported the current color without changing it.
  • If you had too many favorite colors to show at once on the format bar and you scrolled them, you couldn’t select the first scrolled color.
  • In paintings, it wasn’t possible to select the last pixel at the right or bottom of the image.

New in Growly Draw 1.2.0 (Dec 2, 2016)

  • Enhancements:
  • When resizing polygons and scribbles, the grabbers for vertices and control points are no longer scaled with the drawing. This makes it much easier to make fine adjustments to the shape, by simply zooming in. Previously the control points got bigger along with the drawing, so it wasn't much easier to click on the right one at 1600% than it was at 100%.
  • Another enhancement to reshaping is that the vertices and control points have a much higher resolution than they did before, which makes it possible to fine-tune the shape to a greater degree.
  • A new preference controls whether Painting→Move to Drawing centers the new painting in the drawing window (the old behavior) or leaves the pixels in the same place.
  • When you use the eyedropper in the painting, the gray scale palette is updated.
  • When you duplicate a shape in the drawing, the distance between the old and new shapes is initially small, but if you move the new shape before duplicating again, the distance you moved it is used for subsequent duplicates. Drawing→Duplicate Ignoring Previous Moves resets the duplication distance.
  • The shape library (on the Drawing menu) has 21 new shapes.
  • Shapes inserted from the shape library always have “constrain size and shape” turned on, so when you resize they maintain their proportions. You can turn this off if you want to skew the shape.
  • Bug fixes:
  • Undo in the draw window always scrolled back to the top.
  • When resizing a curved polygon, option-click on the outline creates a new vertex. If the line you clicked on was curved so far that it was outside the shape frame (typical for extreme convex curves, like cloud shapes), then option-click didn’t work.
  • Draw would attempt to open certain obscure file types (e.g. obsolete file formats from Mac OS 9), but give up halfway. It tries harder now.

New in Growly Draw 1.1.2 (Aug 12, 2016)

  • Bug fixes.
  • Small enhancements.

New in Growly Draw 1.1.1 (Apr 24, 2016)

  • Enhancements:
  • The status bar, which used to be in the lower-left corner of the window, has been moved to the upper-right corner, because it was hidden if you didn’t always show scroll bars. Therefore the window tabs are now always shown, even if you don’t have any paintings open in the document.
  • Hold down the control key when you start using the brush, blur, or eraser tool in a painting to toggle the brush size from small to big and back.
  • When opening a PDF file, the import scale dialog now allows you to choose which page of the PDF to import.
  • The grid spacing (set in Preferences) is now rounded to 1/10 point (1/720”) instead of 1 point. You can therefore have grid spacing in multiples of tenths of an inch.
  • A new preference causes new documents and image files (other than native Draw files) to be opened maximized (taking up the whole screen, like Window→Zoom).
  • When dragging pixels around in paintings, the status bar (top right, remember?) shows how far you've dragged, in pixels.
  • Bug fixes:
  • When setting the scale value in the Painting properties text field, you had to undo twice to reverse the change.
  • When showing inch fractions as the measurement units, 1/10” and similar values were not reported properly.
  • Some measurement fields didn’t respond to unit changes.
  • Grouping a bunch of parallel vertical or horizontal lines didn’t redraw properly, and the group had a bogus size.
  • When a group contained a painting, the painting was lost on save.
  • When increasing the size for paintings that had no mask, Painting→Painting Size chopped off part of the image.
  • Selecting a recent arrow from the Info bar tool didn't update the format panel.
  • Cropping paintings:
  • Draw didn't scroll to the top after cropping; it could leave nothing visible.
  • The top and left edges of the cropping rectangle could not be dragged to the edge of the painting.

New in Growly Draw 1.1.0 (Dec 28, 2015)

  • New blur and smudge tool. You can use translucent colors with the shape tools in paintings.

New in Growly Draw 1.0.2 (Sep 29, 2015)

  • The flipped version of an object that could not be flipped has has been added to the library.
  • The eyedropper tool in the draw window has been enhanced. If you hold down ⌘ when you click with the eyedropper, it will apply a color instead of picking one up. ⌘ applies the fill color to what you click, ⌘-option applies the line color. This makes it simple to transfer colors from one place to another.
  • When copying a single painting that has no embellishments (scaling, shadow, rotation, etc.), Draw does not shrink the image that’s copied: it copies the original faithfully.
  • A new command, Painting→Painting Size, will change the size of the painting with a special option. If you’re increasing the size of the painting, you can choose to have the old pixels centered in the new canvas instead of sticking to the top/left, as all the other resizing methods do.
  • The image created for drag-and-drop of outlined elements was bloated. This was almost unnoticeable except for lines, which were comically expanded.
  • More kinds of Quickdraw files can be imported successfully.
  • If a file that had been open in the last session was thrown in the Trash, Draw would open it from the Trash the next time you started Draw.

New in Growly Draw 1.0.1 (Sep 29, 2015)

  • During polygon or scribble reshaping, holding down the shift key when you move a point constrains the movement to horizontal or vertical. The shift key has no effect when dragging curve control points (the triangles).
  • More kinds of Quickdraw files can be imported successfully.
  • Bug fixes.