Hello, Lightwell for Chromebook
“These are the (An)droids you are looking for…”
When we released Lightwell last year, we set out to empower creators to make interactive content without touching a single line of code. The foundation of our mission was built on better creative tools — tools that could enable creatives to develop finished products, make their own apps and ultimately, take their work further.
The evolution of storytelling paired with the advancement of new hardware technologies will open up a new world of interactive content; one that will be powered by more accessible software tools and platforms. That’s why we’re excited to share what we’ve built these past few months.
Introducing a newer, faster and more accessible Lightwell 😁
Lightwell is now available on Chromebook!
Cross Platform Creation
Lightwell was originally built for Mac OS because of our roots building the Pan Series as native interactive story apps for the Apple App Store. 🐼However as we’ve seen hardware preferences expand, it was important to build a tool that would be accessible for a wider community, from creative professionals to hobbyists to student creators.
This was a particularly fun technical challenge for our team and we’re one of the first to get Swift running on Android x86. The same codebase that drives Lightwell’s canvas and controls runs on on both Mac and Android, meaning cleaner code and faster deployment of new features. This also gets us one step closer to deployment on ARM and all Android systems next.
Ease of Extensibility
The other half of accessibility is the extensibility of our framework to publish to new platforms, allowing creators to reach wider audiences. This meant rebuilding our visual engine in order to give creators more fine-grain control of their content no matter where they publish to.
We migrated our core rendering pipeline over to OpenGL a few months back, and this is the proof of concept that our “HSK” Hullabalu Story Kit can plug in and publish to even more platforms. Here’s to a future where creators can build once in Lightwell’s visual tool, and export to any native mobile platform.
What does this mean for creators?
- Chromebook compatibility — Lightwell is now available on Chromebooks as an Android app download. Even the lightest machines can create the same beautiful, complex experiences that were previously only possible on a Mac. Download it on Google Play.👈
- Editor Previewing — We’ve added desktop previewing in the Editor so you no longer need a mobile device to test apps before publishing. Switching between ‘editing’ and ‘previewing’ states is super simple, and even smoother if your computer doubles as a tablet like many of the hybrid touch device machines out there. Feel free to ask yourself: What is a computer? What is a tablet? What is a week-end? 💻📲
- Warning System — A warning system is now in place to help catch issues, fix broken links or remove unused assets. It’s an easy way to do creative “product debugging” on projects and make your app production-ready. Visual debugging beats code debugging any day of the week.👾
- Alignment—Layers can be aligned in all directions and distributed evenly with a simple selection. You’ll also see alignment lines appear as you edit and move layers on the Canvas. 📐
- Copy, Paste & Auto Saving —You can now Command+C / V all of your layers, interactions, animations and audio across scenes in your project. Create something once, use it everywhere, and it’s automatically saved for future editing.✂️
Coming Soon
This version is a big step towards empowering even more people to create interactive experiences. While we continue to develop support for more platforms, we’re also looking to expand the types of experiences and products that can be built in Lightwell. This includes enabling interaction logic and variables in an intuitive visual interface. More to come on this!
We’re grateful to the many customers and creators that have helped us understand your creation process, and look forward to continuing to build Lightwell for you! 🙌
Make sure to update to the newest version of Lightwell. If you don’t see an automatic update reminder, you can always “Check for Updates” in your main menu.
Until next time Lightwellers! Happy Creating! ✨
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Download Lightwell for Mac OS X
Download the Lightwell Previewer app for iOS
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