Many of our customers asked to be able to turn off collaboration temporarily, and prevent anyone else from drawing for a while. This feature is handy if you need to talk about your initial ideas before you collaborate, or focus the conversation and set the right context before letting everyone loose on your board.
We love giving you things you ask for, so here's Solo Draw mode!
If you work with digital images that have transparency in them, and use any software besides Photoshop, you might run into the term “premultiplied alpha.” Texture artists, compositors, film-makers, technical directors, game artists, and graphics programmers all run into premultiplied alpha sooner or later. Premultiplied alpha sounds like a mathematical mouthful, so what does it mean?
Despite the intimidating "mathy" sounding name, premultiplied alpha is actually a very simple and non-technical concept. Let me break it down for you.
Communication. It’s tricky. Sometimes what you mean and what you say come out in two totally different ways. Adding to this sticky wicket is technology, distance as a remote worker, and the many opportunities it brings to mangle your communication.
Sometimes you’re in a hurry, sometimes your mood can color the tone of what you’re reading, and sometimes you just don’t fully understand what’s communicated because there’s just something …missing.
Premultiplied alpha.
If you’ve dabbled in graphics at all, you’ve probably heard this term. You might even know what is, but do you know when to use it and when not to? Are you using it by default? Do you know why browsers default to premultiplied blending of WebGL canvases? Do you know why artists prefer to work with images that are not premultiplied?
Eric Haines wrote a great piece recently about why graphics programmers need to understand premultiplied alpha to avoid the all too common fringing problems. If you read that and already believe him or have already switched, you can skip my two cents. If you haven’t read it, I’ll wait.
What we're going to talk about here is a different reason why understanding premultiplied alpha is important, and why premultiplied alpha is more important with WebGL than it was with OpenGL.
Sometimes you need a free flowing river of ideas to solve a problem or kick off a project.
Time to bring in the team!
But what if your team is spread out across a city, the country, or even the world? How do you brainstorm together when you’re working in different buildings, different cities, or even different countries?
Here's a handy new feature in Limnu we added this week. You and your collaborators can now put shared pins on your big boards to bookmark and name places, and help you remember where your work is and get back to it quickly!
We've just added a super easy way to launch a video chat while you're collaborating and whiteboarding in Limnu!
Recently, our friend Peter Shirley speed-wrote a technical book, about how to write rendering software. He also wrote about the process of speed-writing a technical book. His goals were to show that 1- writing high quality rendering software is fun and can be done easily and quickly, and 2- writing a technical book can also be fun and done easily and quickly.
Slack has recently made it possible for us to simplify our Slack-Limnu integration process down to pushing a single button. You used to have to follow a whole page of instructions to get the integration working. Now, we are not pulling your leg or jingling your bell when we say it's so easy, it's ridiculous.
Have you ever sketched something on a whiteboard, needed to squeeze in a new idea that doesn't fit, and realized you didn't quite plan it out like a boss? We have! But you shouldn't have to plan out a brainstorm, right? So Limnu just got a pretty big upgrade, and now you can select and move all the things!
