It’s pretty cold in Canada this winter, and Adam, our lead Flow engineer, has been bunkered down through most of it, rebuilding Flow’s drawing engine from the ground up.
A drawing engine isn’t the kind of thing users see. It’s the layer underneath everything: how strokes are stored, how pages load, how the canvas pans and zooms, how erasing decides what to remove, how patterns are drawn at the back of every page. We’d outgrown the previous one. There were features on the roadmap that the old engine simply couldn’t reach.
So Adam started over. Months of work, a complete rewrite, no shortcuts. It’s been a mammoth effort, but he’s emerged with a foundation that will unlock the next generation of Flow features.
Right now though, you get to enjoy the first big thing: a huge new leap in performance.
Pages load like never before
Pages load so fast now that it’s actually taken us a bit of time to get used to it. Is that irony? We aren’t entirely sure. The important thing is: no more waiting as you move around your document.
If you’ve ever felt the small drag of waiting for a page to settle before you could draw on it, that drag is gone.
Drawing is suddenly responsive
The tools now work even faster than we thought possible. It really does feel like ink is flowing out as fast as you can write and draw.
That’s the magic of a properly modern engine: less time between I intend to draw a stroke and the stroke is on the page. For anyone who’s ever tried to keep up with the pace of a thought, this is the difference between drawing in real time and stopping to wait for the app to catch up.
Panning is suddenly a joy
Panning around documents in this new engine is so smooth it’s simply a joy. There’s not much more to say about it. You’ll feel it the moment you swipe.
You can zoom 10× further
You can now zoom in ten times further than before. Yes, really. Ten times.
Until now, if you wanted to dot an “i” properly or refine a tiny annotation in the corner of a mood board, you’d hit Flow’s zoom ceiling and run out of room. That ceiling has been pushed way, way out.
More accurate selecting and erasing
The lasso and eraser tools now work much more precisely. The lasso traces where your strokes actually are, no more grabbing the empty space around the edges of a brush mark. The stroke eraser uses that same precision, so it picks up only what you’re trying to remove. Small things. Big quality-of-life improvement.
Better drawing resolution
The page now displays at full resolution all the time. You’ll no longer see unsightly changes in resolution as you draw new strokes (something that could happen before, especially with tools like the crayon). What you see is what you get, at every zoom level.
Sharper background patterns
Grids, dots, and lines now stay crisp no matter how far in you go. Zoom all the way in and the page still looks like a designed thing, not a pixelated approximation of one.
A better correction pen
The correction pen has had a complete rethink. A better edge, full layer support, and (with Apple Pencil) a live preview that shows exactly where you’ll erase before you touch down. It’s gone from a blunt tool to a precise one.
One thing leaving the app
The page scrubber has been retired in this release. A new way to see and manage the pages of your documents is on the way. We wanted to ship the engine work first and give the new approach the time it deserves. Stay tuned.
Questions? Talk to us at flow@bonobolabs.com. We’re human.
Flow 4.5 is available today on the App Store. As always, thank you for drawing with us.
– The Bonobo Team
