Over the past few months, our team has been working on redesigning the Fable editor experience to be more usable, delightful, and powerful than ever. Today, we’re releasing our first iteration of the design changes. We’ve decluttered the inspector, added a fresh coat of paint, and updated our design and interaction norms across the editor.

Also: Connections panel

The Connections Panel is a new interface that lets you quickly set input and output connections for your properties. The new panel lists all options to which a selected property can be connected. It also enables you to set both input and output connections from one place, so you don’t need to drag multiple connectors across your screen to create a chain of connections.

To open the Connections Panel, hover over a property on the Inspector and click the blue dot that appears to the left of the input. You will see two fields on the panel: “Controlled by” and “Controlling.” Each field features a dropdown list of all connectable layer properties. If you click one of the listings, the properties will be connected.

The existing drag-to-connect functionality using Property Connectors is still supported.

To learn more about Connections and the Connections Panel, refer to our help docs.

Fixes & improvements

• GIFs can now be imported into projects.

• Added the ability to set anchor points for transform adjustments on the Text Animator effect.

• Improved the reliability of export downloads.

• Improved export performance for projects without audio.

• Improved audio playback performance.

• Fixed a bug that caused properties to not display for effects/behaviors that were collapsed on the inspector.

• Fixed an issue that caused audio tracks to play beyond the layer’s out-point. Now, audio layers will play only during the layer length designated on the timeline.

• Fixed an issue that caused lines and artifacts to render around shape edges when exporting GIFs.

• Fixed an issue that caused Fable to not open on Safari sometimes.

• Fixed an issue that caused editing text layers to crash the editor.

• Fixed an issue that caused the parent-child relationship between layers to be broken when creating new scenes with the layers.

• Fixed an issue that caused hidden layers to be visible in Lottie exports.

• Fixed an issue that caused certain projects to be unopenable if they had an effect with keyframes toggled off.

• Fixed an issue that caused certain variable fonts to upload unsuccessfully.

• Fixed an issue that caused the project dimensions field to display the incorrect option for custom property dimensions.

• Fixed an issue where some properties would remain visible when an effects block was collapsed.