Build Update #2

No tricks today, only treats. Here's what's new since yesterday.

A tape measure

Pick Measure in the top bar, or press T. Click one face, then another, and it gives you the distance between them: straight across where the two face each other, wherever you clicked on each, and point to point where they don't. It also tells you which side of each wall you measured from, like "10 ft 2 in · inside to inside". To start from a face, right-click it and choose Start measure. From Overhead it measures flat on the plan. Measure twice, cut once. The first part just got easier.

Stairs have a style

Pick one from a stair's Style list. Wood has a board on every riser. Open is stringers and treads with nothing between. Floating is thick treads held out from the wall. Block and brick are solid steps. A stair inside starts as wood, and one outside starts as open.

Posts, and beams under floors

The new Post tool, next to Beam, puts down a post with one click: wood, or a round steel column. It stands on a footing in the slab and goes up to the beam over it, or to the floor joists or the ceiling if there's no beam. A beam can now hold up the floor of the level above. It runs across the joists, dropped below them or flush, and the joists break over it.

Also new

In the editor

• A change now shows in about half the time it took. If your house is big or your computer is slow, turn on Draw faster in ⌘K's View, and the house redraws nearly three times as fast.
• When Ask adds a door or a window, it places it the way the Door and Window tools do: kept off the corners and lined up with its bay.
• Under the Default rules, a door or window can now sit 6 in from the end of its wall, where it had to be 16.
• A porch or a wing that runs straight on from the end of the main roof, at the same pitch, is now under one gable with the house, one ridge end to end.

Community

• Posts and replies have buttons for bold, italic, headings, quotes, code, links and lists. ⌘B, ⌘I and ⌘K work the way they do on GitHub.
• The builds members show off have a page of their own, Showcases, with the ones we feature among them.

Fixes

• If a property is open in two tabs, or you change it from Ask or your AI app while it's open, an older tab no longer writes its copy back over your newer change.
• Out of tokens? The gallery still opens, so you can place what you've already made.
• Menus close when you click away or press Escape.

Happy Halloween. Now go build something, and show us in Builds and projects, with your house on a line of its own so we can all give it a spin. If it's haunted, even better. Tell us what you think in Discussion, too.