What's new

The story of DoodLoop, newest first.

Unreleased

Drawing

• Onion skin is on for new projects. Add a second frame and a faint ghost of the first sits underneath it, which is how you line up movement. It was always there, behind a small button that was easy to miss. The ghosts stay a guide only: never part of the drawing, never in an export, and the button at the bottom-left still turns them off or changes how many frames show.

• Undo survives leaving a frame. Stepping to another frame used to make everything you had just done permanent. The work you do on a frame is now one undo step that stays available after you leave it.

• Lock Transparency on a layer. Paint lands only where the layer already has paint, so you can shade and recolour a shape without going over its edges. Sits next to Clip to Layer Below in the layer menu.

• Airbrushes build up again. Working over the same area inside one stroke used to stop darkening almost at once, because overlapping dabs took a maximum rather than accumulating, which made the dab's flow a ceiling on the whole stroke. Scrubbing now reaches solid, and one pass is still a soft tone.

• The 3D brushes no longer break into rings. A dab that turns with the stroke was turning with the hand's tremor, so drawing slowly produced a chain of separate hemispheres instead of a tube.

• Every brush preview is drawn by that brush. The list used to show a separate approximation of each brush, which had drifted from what the brushes do. They are also legible in dark mode now.

• The tool rail is a single column on iPad. It went to two columns for the phone held sideways, where the rail and the settings card share about 440pt and neither may scroll. An iPad has room several times over, so two columns were only ever a wider panel covering more of the drawing. The choice is made from the height actually offered, so a sideways phone still gets two.

• The hidden menus have a way in. Frame actions (note, duplicate, hold, move, delete) were reachable only by holding a thumbnail, which nobody finds on a touch screen. The current frame now carries a small "..." button, and the layer row's actions button is an ellipsis instead of an up/down caret that read as "reorder". Holding still works everywhere it did.

• Tap a shape to pick it up. With the Select tool, a tap selects the shape under your finger instead of making a one-pixel marquee. It shares its region finder with the paint bucket, so the two can never disagree about where a shape ends. You have to tap on something: a flood from blank paper covers the whole background and would lift the page.

• Cut out the subject. Vision's on-device foreground mask, in the Select tool, aimed squarely at photos brought in as reference. It says which of the two ways it failed, because "no subject in your drawing" and "the feature could not start" are different news.

• Importing a video keeps its soundtrack, as an ordinary audio track.

• A sideways phone gets its maximize button back. It was gated on a compact width, and a large iPhone in landscape reports a regular one, so the control vanished on the screen with the least room for chrome.

Fixed

• A project saved before clipping masks existed could not be opened at all. A layer decoded with every field required, so one added field orphaned older files. Layers now decode with fallbacks.

Under the hood

• Projects open faster. Every layer of every frame was being turned into an image and straight back again on the way in and on the way out, which could not change a pixel and cost a lot on a project with many frames. That round trip is gone, and cell compression no longer runs on the main thread.

Select & transform

• Perspective distort: a new mode on the selection bar turns the corner handles into corner pins, so you can pull a selection into perspective for signs, screens, and cast shadows. The original pixels are kept until you tap Done, so experimenting never degrades the art.
• Select everything on this layer: one tap in the Select tool floats the whole drawing on the current layer, ready to move, resize, rotate, or flip.
• Cancel button next to Done: puts the selection back exactly as it was before you picked it up, and removes a paste you changed your mind about.
• Squash & stretch fixed: dragging an edge handle of a selection that had already been moved, rotated, or pasted could slide it across the canvas, and the first touch could make it jump. Edge handles now stretch smoothly in place, like the corner and rotate handles.

Interface

• The tool panel follows your finger when you drag it. It used to move at half speed, so a drag across the whole screen left it stranded in the middle, and it could snap back to the side you dragged it from.

Layers

• Merge Down: bake a layer onto the one below it, across every frame, with its opacity, blend mode, and clipping applied exactly as they look on the canvas. Confirms first, because it affects the whole project.

Animate

• Frame notes: touch and hold a frame and pick Add Note to write a line of text about it, like "extreme pose here" or "fix the left hand". The frame shows a note badge. Notes are never drawn on the canvas and never exported, and they are free.
• The hand-drawn markup on a frame is now called an annotation, not a note, so the two are told apart: an annotation is drawn on the frame with a pen (and is Pro), a note is text about it. Nothing changed about how annotations work, and existing ones are untouched.
• Holds you can set: touch and hold a frame and pick Hold to keep it on screen for several timeline steps. Held frames show it on their number badge.
• Playback honours holds: the player, the audio playhead, and new clip placement now run on the same exposure timeline the exporters always used, so what you preview is what you export.
• Change the frame rate any time from the fps chip above the timeline. No frames are added or dropped, the animation just plays faster or slower.
• Drag to reorder frames in the Frames Viewer.

Draw

• Nineteen new brushes, forty in all, filed into groups: Drawing, Shading & Texture, Halftone, Patterns & Shapes, Nature & Decoration, and 3D. Halftone shades like print (the dot lattice is locked to the canvas, not to the dab, so overlapping strokes share one grid). Dash, Saw and Heartbeat run their pattern along the stroke and hold their rhythm at any brush size. Hair and Fur lay down a clump of strands per drag. Leaves, Sparkles, Gear, Dots, Squares, Pixel and Mosaic stamp as you go.
• Brushes whose colour changes as you draw: Gradient sweeps hues along the stroke, Sprinkles scatters them, and 3D Brush and 3D Candy Cane are shaded across their own width so they read as rounded tubes. The picked colour seeds all four, so the colour well still means something for them.
• Settings a brush cannot honour are disabled and labelled rather than left sitting there doing nothing (stabilizer on a scattered brush, pressure taper on Pixel).
• Steadier strokes: a dab could occasionally be drawn with another dab's position and size, showing up as a stray bump or gap in a fast line.
• Always-visible size dot in the tool dock, drag to change size any time.
• Choose freeform or preset (S/M/L/XL) brush sizes in Settings.
• Stabilizer slider to smooth strokes as you draw.
• Eraser size is independent of the brush size.
• Text on the canvas: live preview, 30+ fonts shown in their own typeface, place as a movable/rotatable selection.
• Reference grid overlay (square, rule of thirds, isometric, 2- and 3-point perspective) that never becomes part of your drawing.
• More shapes: triangle, pentagon, hexagon, star, and heart, alongside line, rectangle, and ellipse.
• Squash & stretch a selection: drag the edge handles to scale it along one axis independently. A selection stays a floating, non-destructive overlay until you commit it, and Undo while it floats cleanly returns to the original.
• Ruler drawing guide: strokes snap to a line, rectangle, circle, or oval you place, move, rotate, and resize on the canvas. Works as a reference edge by default (Keep my distance), so drawing off the guide gives parallel lines and concentric shapes (inside or outside); turn it off to snap onto the guide.
• Symmetry and the ruler share the same feel: they sit together in the bottom-left canvas cluster. Tap to switch on/off, touch and hold to pick the flavour. Their guides show and hide the instant you toggle them.
• Tool outline: a live ring showing brush/eraser/shape size at your fingertip or Pencil as you draw (dashed for the eraser). Toggle it, and pick finger/Pencil, in Settings.
• Fresh Phosphor icon set, and a marching-ants outline around selections and pastes.

Animate

• Frame annotations (Pro): mark up a frame by hand, even out in the margin around the canvas. Annotations have their own colour and size, a clear "Annotating" mode with a coloured border, an eye to show/hide them, an eraser, and clear-all. They are never played back and never exported.
• Copy and paste frames: copy a frame from its menu, then paste it at the end from the frames strip.
• The frame + button can switch (touch and hold) between Add frame and Duplicate last frame, and remembers your choice for one-tap repeats.
• Import from the camera: snap a reference photo and draw over it.
• Onion skin gains Loop (wrap around the ends), a colour on/off toggle, and separate before/after counts and blend.
• Docked audio timeline: waveform clips on a time ruler, drag to move, trim handles, and per-clip speed and fade in/out. Centered transport (skip to start / play / skip to end), an mm:ss ruler ticked per frame, and a playhead that glides as it plays.

Share

• Large exports no longer run out of memory. GIF and APNG built the whole animation in memory before writing anything (ImageIO holds every image handed to a CGImageDestination until it is finalized), so a 4K or long export could be killed outright. Frames are now spilled to disk and added from a file-backed source, so only a handful are ever resident.
• Time-lapse recording: capture how a drawing comes together and export it as its own video.

Interface

• The tool panel floats over the canvas instead of being a rail cut out of it, so the canvas keeps its full width. Tools at the top, the active tool's settings in the middle (they appear and disappear with the tool), and mirror, ruler and annotations at the bottom. Drag the handle to park it on either side at any height; it snaps to the nearest side and is remembered.
• Redesigned editor top bar that adapts to small screens (iPad mini, Split View) by folding actions into Media and View menus instead of clipping.
• The dock is tools only; colour, size, symmetry, and Fit moved to a compact bottom-left canvas cluster.
• Groups on the home screen: an All / Groups toggle, with your own named stacks plus automatic rows (Recent, Earlier, Small, Large).
• Import from the camera, and the frame + can switch to duplicate mode.

Get set up

• A first-run welcome screen, an in-editor guided tour (the ? button), Lock rotation, and the option to keep unsaved sheet input.
• Report a bug and an Open source acknowledgements list in Settings.

Version 1.0.1

Fixed

• Your brush setup now stays with each project. Size, colour, opacity, eraser size, the tool you were using, and the rest of the tool settings are remembered per project, so leaving a drawing and coming back picks up exactly where you left off instead of snapping back to a size 24 brush.
• Pinch to zoom now zooms where your fingers are. The canvas used to scale around its own centre, so zooming out pushed the drawing away from you and it was easy to end up staring at empty space. It now stays under your fingers, twist included, and the canvas can no longer be flung fully off screen.
• The canvas no longer tilts every time you zoom. Two-finger rotation now has some resistance: a twist has to be deliberate before the canvas turns, and it holds a small detent at level so it is easy to land straight again.
• Level the canvas in one tap. Whenever the canvas is tilted, a control appears next to Undo and Redo showing the angle. Tap it and the canvas spins back to 0 degrees, leaving your zoom and position alone.

Added

• Send feedback / get support in Settings → About & Help: one tap opens the nubisco.io contact form and your message reaches the team directly.

Changed

• Reporting a bug is one tap now. It opens the contact form straight away, with your app and device details already attached, and you write what happened there instead of filling in a form inside the app first.

Improved

• The size you are setting is no longer under your finger. Dragging the size dot now floats a large number above your fingertip, so you can see the value as you scrub. Annotation size in annotation mode does the same.

Version 1.0

The first release of DoodLoop.

Draw

• A data-driven brush engine with a visual brush picker, essentials (pens, pencils, ink, brush, crayon, calligraphy, highlighter, airbrush) and a shading set, plus savable custom brushes.
• Apple Pencil pressure and tilt.
• Fill (bucket) with threshold, gap-close, smooth edges, whole-layer, and sample-all-layers.
• Smudge and Blur.
• Shapes (line, rectangle, ellipse) and Symmetry.
• Select, move, scale, rotate, flip.
• Text and Eyedropper.

Animate

• Frame-by-frame timeline with duplicate, reorder, and holds.
• Layers with blend modes and glow.
• Onion skin with adjustable range, opacity, and colors.
• Looping playback with an adjustable frame rate.

Sound & share

• Record and import audio on multiple tracks, synced to your animation.
• Export video (MP4/HEVC), animated GIF, APNG, and PNG sequences, never watermarked.

Your work

• Projects are open .doodloop files in the Files app.
• One-tap backup and restore, and Recently Deleted.
• Import existing FlipaClip projects with layers intact.

Free & Pro

• Free to make and share animations, no ads, no watermarks.
• A one-time Pro unlock for higher frame rates, larger canvases, and pro export formats.