Release Notes
The updated Slack integration for Abstract Notebooks automatically shares notifications for notebook reviews to one or more of your Slack channels of choice, and unfurls Notebook links pasted into Slack.
Sometimes your ideas need a little more structure. Whether you need to track a project, take structured notes, or organize data sets, tables are a great way to organize your thoughts. Notebooks users can now add and delete tables in their Notebook by selecting the table icon in the context menu. Tables can be retrofitted to your requirements by resizing columns, adding cell colors, and multi-selecting rows, columns, and cells.
- Added the ability to edit and delete recorded decision blocks. While it's important to maintain the history of decisions in an initiative, sometime you need to correct a typo or add clarifying details or links.
- Updated the custom templates administration page to warn administrators of unsaved template changes, improve cursor movement between title and template body, and add hover text to edit and delete icons to improve accessibility.
- Users can now highlight text in a Notebook, paste a URL from the clipboard, and the text will become a link.
Images and designs are vital components to a building out a Notebook and explaining your work. We have improved the drag and drop functionality when repositioning images and designs in a Notebook to make interacting with these components easier. Here are a few updates we made to improve repositioning images and designs:
- When an image or design selected, the curser will become a hand-grab curser .
- The image or design selected will dim to illustrate that it is selected.
- A thumbnail preview of the design will display it is repositioned
- The cursor will reflect the exact location where the item will be repositioned to.
Participants in the FigJam Plugin Beta can now use the Abstract Notebooks plugin for Figma to add content and groups to Notebooks from FigJam.
Notebooks contributors can now edit their Notebook settings to share a Notebook to anyone with the Notebook link. Unauthenticated users viewing a Notebook will be able to read the contents of the Notebook (written and image content, comments, and reviews) but will not have edit access. These unauthenticated users can create an account and request organization access to edit the Notebook.
Contributors can now add decisions to Notebooks to show how and why a design choice was made. Notebook participants can view the series of decisions made in new section at the top of the Notebook. Record a decision title and, if desired, additional information about why, where, and how the decision was made. You can even link to detailed conversations, whether those are in a Review, Comment, meeting recording, chat thread, or elsewhere.
We've collapsed the Reviews section at the top of the notebook to show only the most recent review by default. You can click "View all" to expand and view each of the notebook's existing reviews. We've also moved the "Request review" button next to the status selector to make more room for the notebook's title.
Abstract Home
- Design isn’t linear. Moving from project to project as well as designing and building in tandem can lead to losing track of where we started. On Abstract Home, your most recently viewed notebooks and pressing action items are listed for you so that you can continue where you left off.
Reviews
- Notebook reviewers can now see all their reviews at a glance on the review tab. Reviews are categorized by Assigned to me, My Reviews, and Completed reviews. Users of both Branches and Notebooks can toggle between the reviews that are visible.
Custom Templates
- Templates save teams time and ensure that Notebooks have consistent content. Enterprise organizations can now extend the default set of Notebook templates to include custom-defined templates which meet the specific needs of their organizations.
Notebooks Contributors can now resolve individual comments made by themselves or others within a Notebook to indicate that the comment does not require further conversation.
This version contains various updates to ensure better app performance and stability
We have shipped a new major version of our Branches desktop app (v98) with a number of performance and usability improvements including:
Performance Improvements:
- Stability and performance of Branches Sketch plugin while opening and saving Sketch documents
- Branches Sketch plugin (Reduced in size by about 1MB)
Usability Improvements:
- When a file is uploaded to Sketch Workspace, closed, then reopened, Branches users have to upload the file to Sketch Workspace as a new file instead of being able to update the already existing instance. This workflow is not ideal so we have updated our Sketch plugin to reallocate with the appropriate Sketch file.
- Correct timing dependent commit condition that resulted in the loss of recent commits.
- Remove the Open Quick Commit button from Branches app as it opens an old commit, Quick Commit happens over in the Sketch plugin.
Enhancements
- Contributors can now leave multi-line commit messages!
Fixes
- Some odd interactions between the Sketch editing file and the .abstractBackup file that may have prevented committing work on a branch have been resolved.
- Resolved an uncommon bug that caused Sketch to crash when committing.
- Abstract and the Gallery Sketch plugin are more compatible now.
- When using Safari, on hover in preview and Collections layers, the overlay controls no longer remain visible after hovering.
- Projects once again correctly sort by with the “recently updated” option.
- Organizations owners are now able to leave the organization when other org admins exist via the Personal Settings menu.
- The notifications window should now close as expected after clicking on a notification.
This release of the Abstract Versions desktop app contains a few bug fixes and improvements.
Enhancements
- Updated the name of our Sketch plugin to Abstract Versions, to make way for our upcoming Notebooks plugin.
- Added support for XD version 36 and beyond.
Fixes
- Resolved issues causing some artboards and changes to be lost after committing.
- Re-enabled the keyboard shortcut cmd + enter for submitting the quick commit form.
- Updated broken Help Center links in the XD plugin.
- Fixed an issue causing an alert dialog to appear when saving a tracked file in Sketch.
- Resolved an issue where the Sketch commit bar did not show the project name for certain libraries after opening from Sketch.
New Features
- We've added Apple Silicon architecture support for Abstract CLI and Sketch plugin
- We improved how you move around the app with a unified global navigation and theme
Enhancements
- Contributors are now able to open a file untracked while the same file has already been opened tracked
Fixes
- Fixed a bug where the commit window would appear on the wrong screen when using an external display
Enhancements
- Abstract now supports XD 35.
Fixes
- Abstract will now share a more helpful error message if an action fails because it requires a local Sketch installation.
- Fixed an issue where Inspect would show an incorrect background fill color on a symbol instance after an override was removed from the master symbol.
🌊 We’ve added Big Sur support! This includes a new application icon as well as speed enhancements to the Quick Commit window via a new, native Sketch plugin.
Bug Fixes
- Added support for Adobe XD v34
- Fixed a bug where components from Abstract libraries couldn’t be used in the insert window
- We no longer force cleanup untracked libraries that are still being used
- Fixed a bug where Sketch Cloud links were breaking after committing and re-opening the same file
- Fixed a rare issue where Sketch would crash after upgrading a file’s version
- When using Big Sur the Quick Commit window will now return focus to Sketch
- Resolve diverged branch button will now always displays as it should without restart
- Project context menus now match throughout the app
- Fixed a bug where an update from master would remove artboards without the conflict resolution flow
Experience better app stability with the bug fixes and behind the scenes improvements we're shipping this release.
Enhancements
- Enabled Abstract support for Sketch v69.
- Enabled Abstract support for XD v33
- Added support for adding, editing, and removing Sketch color variables in the commit history, and linking color variables through libraries.
- Added support for ignored assistants in Sketch.
- We made some tweaks to improve performance when generating assets.
- Adding new colleagues to Abstract? They’ll now see an onboarding tutorial.
Bug Fixes
- Resolved a handful of sync issues that would occur when attempting to pull project data.
- Fixed a bug where progress toasts remained visible on uncommitted changes errors until the app was refreshed.
- Fixed a bug that would prevent the commit footer from appearing despite having changes to commit.
- Fixed a bug where users were able to add removed layers to a collection.
- Fixed a bug that would prevent fullscreen collection presentation to cover the entire window.
- Fixed a rare race condition that would cause comments to instead display an error.
Fixes
- Fixed a bug that would occasionally ask users to update a file’s Sketch version to the same version when Updating from Master; the app will now suggest updating your Sketch version.
- Fixed a bug where linked library symbols wouldn’t appear in the Insert menu.
- Fixed broken links that point to our Help Center.
We’ve made some big performance improvements to commit speed. And, over the next few weeks, we’ll continue rolling out updates to opening, renaming, deleting, and merging files. With Reporting, we’re also surfacing data that gives Admins the ability to see the status of work across the team.
Features
- Reporting: Enterprise admins can now see team activity on projects, branches, and commits, both at the organization and contributor levels (viewable on the web only).
Enhancements
- We’ve been rolling out changes over the last few weeks to make opening files, interacting with files, and creating commits much faster.
- Abstract now fully supports Adobe XD v32.
Fixes
- Fixed an error when updating Adobe XD files based on an invalid version number.
- Prevents an error that occur on projects where files had been opened untracked.
- Fixed “Project could not be unsynced” error.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed sync error on High Sierra.
- Opening a file untracked will no longer fail to sync master branch.