Changelog
A Special Delivery From Us To You 💌
February 14nd, 2024
If you're reading this on February 14th, Happy Valentine's Day. While all you folks are out there living your lives in and out of the Swiftiverse, we've been in the kitchen baking up some new features for you.
If you're reading this on any other day, Happy Regular Day. We've been in the kitchen whipping up some new features for you too.
If open up Trace now, you'll notice that the design has been overhauled and everything loads significantly faster. This is just one of the many performance improvements we've been working on.
We've also added a whole new panel in the editor, sitting inside of the code editor, that let's you upload and manage both your asset catalog, and any other files you want in the project bundle.
This means that you can now upload images, SpriteKit assets, SceneKit files, and whatever else and use them in your project! We're really excited to see what you build with this.
Go out there and break something!
- The Trace Gang
The Block Update (All Bricked Up) 🧱
February 2nd, 2024
Most of you don't realize this, as we've never mentioned it before, but Trace has a whole Exploration and Survey Group, dedicated to unraveling the deeper mysteries of the Swiftiverse.
We're proud to say that the ESG's latest expedition has revealed a deep rooted need for Trace components to be broken down into smaller pieces that can be reused throughout the projects that Trace components are integrated into.
And we're even happier to say that the mad lads back at the tent laboratory have cooked up the ability for Trace to do just this.
Trace now separates larger components into reuseable pieces for you, by default.
Have a whole screen that you're building with Trace and want to reuse the cells or cards or sections that get built? No sweat, just let Trace handle the separation and structuring for you and you kick back and ⌘+c then ⌘+v.
Build something crazy!
- The Trace Crew
Captain! We've found what we were looking for! ⛰️🔭
January 29th, 2024
Here at Trace, we're always hard at work, not only building a platform to make your life easier, but also thinking about what easier means in the first place.
Which is why we're proud to present our new Category UI to you in our explore page. This new layout lets you find specific components much faster, whether you're looking for a new primary button style, or a whole chat screen integration.
This comes with a host of additional updates to performance, and general bugfixes.
We hope this makes your experience 100x better and easier to find what you're looking for to ship that project 100x faster!
Happy building!
- The Trace Team
Slidin' in yo DMs 😏
January 19th, 2024
Can't catch a break with randos in the DMs? Drop the messaging app and just use Duck Chat instead
Duck Chat just got a major glow-up. It's not just smarter; it's like your witty bestie who can reference the entire Swift documentation and answer literally any question you might have. Expect your dev game to level up. 🦆💬
Tired of downloading "ContentView.swift"? Say less. You can rename your files finally with the little box above the simulator. Say goodbye to manually changing your struct names.
For the real ones who need the simulator in landscape mode, we got you. You can now change your simulator orientation. Landscape, portrait, however you roll – we're here for you and whatever device orientation you choose to express yourself with. 🔄
Last but almost definitely least for the wordcels, we've brought back Diff Mode. Seeing changes between versions is back in.
And that's it for this week. Stay tuned for more updates, and happy building!
Drawn and Quartered 👁️👄👁️
January 9th, 2024
It's a new year. And with another revolution around the sun, comes a whole new set of changes, features, dreams, and goals. For the past few weeks, since speeding up our LLM and continually performing our dark rituals of communion with the shoggoth to eke out better and better results, we've also been cooking up a new feature that's so good it's downright diabolical.
Ladies, gentlemen, NBs... You can now draw your components.
Head into the editor, and you'll see a new switch in the top left that should let you toggle between regular preview, and drawing mode. In draw mode, what you see is pretty much what you get. Strap on your drawing pointer and start designing with rectangles, circles, annotations, and whatever else you can think of, and let Trace bring the vision to life.
Alongside these changes, we've also added the ability to upload drawings as part of the prompt, a whole chat assistant to help you flesh out your ideas which we proudly call Duck Chat, and we've launched our new pricing system.
Happy new year, and happy building!
Handling bugs, and working on performance. 🐞🔫
December 1st, 2023
Let's get this out of the way first. Yes, the rumors are true, the duck gifs have been replaced with gifs that demand more emotional investment. We've been hard at work been addressing the bugs and UX issues that the community has been sharing with us.
You should now be seeing better, more consistent outputs from the AI when actually writing code, and we're also tweaking some things under the hood to make the experience more performant.
Folks using Github should also see better integration with the platform and better status messages in the commit interface, while people who were running into issues with running on device should see those issues resolved.
We're really excited to see what you build with Trace, and we're working hard to make sure that you have the best experience possible.
And now, a poem from our president, Duck Ling:
I am a duck
I am a duck
I am a duck
There's a bug on line 12, let me fix that for you
I am a duck
I am a duck
Run your components on Device!
November 7th, 2023
This is huge!!! Just like how you can run your apps on your iphone using XCode, you can now run your components on your device using Trace. Just follow the instructions to configure your certificates and start your apps you create on your device. This is a huge step forward in our mission to make app development more accessible. Setting up certificates can be tricky but we have a guide to help make this process easier.
A Brand New Creation Interface
November 4th, 2023
We've rebuilt the entire editor from scratch and have made it much more simpler and intuitive to use. You can navigate between different versions visually and also switch back and forth between code. We're really excited for this new direction.
Automatically push changes to github repository.
October 25th, 2023
You can now easily create a github repository for your projects through trace and the changes will be automatically pushed to your repository. You can start using this feature by tapping on the github icon at the top right corner of the editor. Currently only comitting via the main branch.
Updated Diff editor with lines
October 18th, 2023
We've setup a new diff editor that now has line numbers along with a better representation of highlights, making it really easy for you to see the changes that have been made in your code.
Redesigned Editor Layout
October 18th, 2023
We've entirely redesigned the editor so you can see the code, simulator, chat and version control side by side. You can directly make changes to the code using the LLM in the "Code" Tab.
Convert chat conversation to code
October 15th, 2023
You can now apply any chat conversation you have about your project into code easily. Say you're talking to the duck about how to build a certain component, once you're done with the convo, you can tap on apply to preview what it would look like. This is a great way to quickly prototype an idea and get started with building your app.
Editor & Version Control Updates
October 11th, 2023
You can now see prompts in the version control panel along with code changes. We've also redesigned the editor layout to make it more intuitive.
New VSCode Based Editor
October 10th, 2023
We've replaced our code editor with a new one that's based on VSCode. It's so much faster, efficient and great to use for writing code.
Version Control / Diffs
October 9th, 2023
We've added a new way of handling version control in the editor. You can now see all the changes you've made by tapping on the clock button at the bottom right corner of the editor. You can also quickly restore any unwanted changes pretty easily.
Duck Chat, Fix Me, Landscape Mode, and more.
October 1st, 2023
The team is in the same town this week, so we shipped a lot of things. You can now pair program with trace's duck. It has context about your code and can give you well informed feedback on what to build.
We've made the simulator draggable, making the code editor full screen and also added the ability to switch between portrait and landscape modes. We've also introduced the "Fix me" button. If you run into any issues while building the app, you can tap on this button and the code automatically rewrites with the fixes in place.
We've also made a ton of other updates that make the experience smoother for you.
Continous Error Checking via GPT-4
October 1st, 2023
A more robust form of error checking that runs in the background and notifies you of any errors in your code. This is powered by a combination of xcode build tools combined with GPT-4 and is a lot more accurate and developer friendly than our previous error checking system.
Detailed Build Errors
September 28th, 2023
We're now displaying more detailed build errors when you try to run a project. This should give you a better understanding of what's wrong with your code and help you debug faster.
Previews in read-only mode
September 27th, 2023
If you're logged in, you can preview a component you're interested in checking out without having to jump into the editor mode.
Autosave & Drafts
September 27th, 2023
We just released an early version of drafts and auto saving. From now on, you don't have to worry about losing your work if you accidentally close the tab and can resume working on your project where you left off. We're going to be releasing more updates on top of this feature in the coming days. Let us know what you think!
Pricing & other updates
September 25th, 2023
We introduced monthly pricing with a free-trial of one entire month for anyone who signs up. We've also made a ton of layout updates introducing a new landing page and a place for docs, explore, etc. We also made a very important internal performance improvement that you'll notice in the coming days.
Download Project / File
Friday, Sep 18th, 2023
You can download your component as a new xcode project or an individual swift file that you can later integrate into a bigger project. This makes it really easy to integrate Trace into your app development workflow. You can find the download buttons on the bottom right corner of your code editor. Let us know what you think!
Code Complete
Friday, Sep 15th, 2023
We've implemented a very early version of code complete. It is GPT based (like github co-pilot) but it's a bit slower. We're going to be shipping speed improvements in the coming days. Let us know what you think!
Error Checking
Friday, Sep 15th, 2023
We've implemented error checking to help you with Debugging. You'll see an indicator on the bottom left side of your code editor that indicates if your code is bug free or has any errors. I personally think our error explainations are better compared to xcode. Let us know what you think!
Hello, World
Friday, Sep 15th, 2023
We've been working on this project for about a month now and have been shipping insane updates, so I've decided to start a changelog to document all the major updates. We usually ship multiple updates per day so a lot of will be consolidated in these short snippets.