After another six weeks of work, we are happy to ship another update of our CreativeEditor SDK (CE.SDK). This release is again packed with great features to enhance the developer experience and user experience. It includes:
- New improved Default UI
- Lockable Design & Placeholders
- SVG Assets
- Multi Selection
- Nudging (moving elements with arrow and shift key)
- Create scenes from an Image.
New Improved Default UI
That is the first release to introduce a new UI type for CE.SDK, which we call Default UI. It comes with a slick interface and focuses on fast design adoption. The Default UI removes the need for inspectors for many editing cases, thus leaving your users undistracted and focused on adapting or creating designs.
Check our official documentation to learn about configuring the UI Elements.
Lockable Design & Placeholders
In the previous version, CE.SDK introduced the roles “creator” and “adopter” – differentiating between template creation and adoption. In creator mode, you have the liberty to create a design from scratch or change existing designs.
When creators are ready to share a design, they define which design elements can be changed when opening the editor in the “adopter” role. Typically, creators will allow adopters to exchange content, but also the options to style or arrange an item can be controlled.
When the editor is opened in the “adopter” role (Default UI), items that are allowed to change will be highlighted and images will be shown with an overlay indicating that the content shall be replaced before exporting or saving the design.
Find more information about placeholders and constraints in our official documentation.
Dashboard
Creating and adopting designs is one part, but organizing designs is another. With this release, we also introduced a dashboard to create and organize your designs for your users. Reach out to us if you want to see a demo of the dashboard in action and understand.
SVG Assets
With this version, we introduced SVG as an asset-type alternative to JPEG and PNG image formats. This has the benefit that standard SVG Stickers can just be used or uploaded in every design. This has the major advantage that stickers will be crisp at any resolution while coming with a very low download size. Reducing the server load and data transfer for you and your users. In this turn, we also replaced all our example stickers with their SVG equivalents.
Multi Selection
Positioning multiple items at once has been a pain before this release, but not anymore. With the new multi-selection interaction, users can select two or more items at once. Just hold down the “shift” modifier key and start selecting multiple items. Once selected, they can be moved around simultaneously.
Nudging
Always wanted to fine-tune your design and pixel-perfectly align your content?
You can now use the arrow keys (⬅️, ➡️, ⬆️ ⬇️) to nudge the selected items to their correct position pixel by pixel. You can also hold down shift to nudge even further.
Create Scene from Image
Before this release, the CE.SDK could either start from an empty or a predefined scene. From now on, there is also an option to start the editor with any image. It will auto-create a page with the size of the given image and insert the image into this one, allowing a more content-driven creation process. Learn how to create a scene from an image in our documentation.
Minor changes
Besides the major features, there are a ton of small improvements. These include:
- UI interface to rename items and pages to a user-defined name
- Ability to choose between two UI types, “default” and “advanced”
- Searching in image libraries now uses i18n translations
- Ability to change the UI Font.
Feel free to send us any questions, or let us know what you think on Twitter.