All new feeds page, Live Folders and more —new features in References.Design 2.0

Published in

References.Design

4 min readFeb 25, 2019

We’ve been working on the 2.0 version of References.Design for a while, and here are the highlights of some of the new features:

Brand New Feeds Page

We’ve rebuilt the Feeds engine from ground up and now there are a lot more contents for your inspiration. We’ve also put them into different categories so that you can be more specific about which type of contents you want to browse.

You can also search them with any keywords, we will try to find the best results from all the design communities.

Share to social networks

Sharing to social networks is also made easier. You can easily share the inspiration to facebook or twitter, or to add it into your Pinterest boards.

Live Folders

You’ve already saved lot of images into your folders and don’t want to duplicated them into some hidden places? No problem! Now you can simply link a folder and all your contents will be scanned and indexed — no more duplicates!

Should there be any changes in the folder, they will be automatically detected and refreshed in the app within a few seconds.

Everything stays in where they are before, we will never add or remove anything in your folders without permission.

Remote, shared team folders and offline access

Not only that you can link with your local folders, you can also choose to connect to a remote folder. If a team has a shared folder on an internal server, everyone can connect to that folder for sharing inspirations and mood-boards.

In case that you may temporarily lose the connection to the remote folder, References.Design will automatically cache the thumbnails for offline access. So even if you are not able to access the original files, the thumbnails will still be there for your inspiration.

Bonus: Cloud sync and backup

Now that you can add any folders into the watching list, you can also add your Dropbox, iCloud, Google Drive or any other cloud syncing folder as you like. This way you could have a synced library and revisit them on another computer.

Analyze on demand

References.Design needs to analyze the images in order to recommend related contents with Inspire Me! feature. We’ve improved the analyzing performance in 2.0, it is much faster that previous version.

In the case that you really don’t want to spend any time on this, there is also an option to completely turn off the analyzing. Don’t worry, Inspire Me! still works with the option turned off. It will just recommend random contents, thought.

Sort by time or randomly

We thought it could be boring if you have to see the contents in the same order every time you open the app. So other than sorting contents by time, you can also choose to show them randomly. Each time you click on the random button, it will shuffle all the contents.

Light theme

The dark interface of References.Design provides an immersive, distraction-free experience for browsing your amazing contents. However, it is also true that in some cases — under a direct sunshine for example — it would be better to have a light background.

In version 2, you now have the options to switch between dark or light themes.

Collapsible sidebar

We also didn’t forget about the little details. We made the sidebar collapsible, so that you can maximize the space for your contents.

Last but not least, a free version

References.Design is s paid application. We have a trial period offered in the Windows version. Unfortunately this is not an option for the Mac platform.

So we also created a lite edition for the Mac AppStore as a teaser of the full version. Read this article for details about the differences between the free and full versions.