Jul 27, 2026

Chamfered (26.5.7 Build 28)

New

  • Zoom TrackPoint — a third puck sits next to the orbit joystick and drags vertically only: up zooms in, down zooms out, and it springs back to center when you let go. Same feel as the orbit joystick, just for zoom. A matching Zoom sensitivity slider has been added to Viewport settings, alongside Orbit and Pan.
  • Trackpad orbit/pan is back — two-finger drag on the trackpad orbits the camera again, and Shift + two-finger drag pans, working side by side with the TrackPoint joystick rather than replacing it. Use whichever fits the moment: trackpad for fast, sweeping moves, TrackPoint for slow, precise ones. Pinch-to-zoom and scroll-wheel zoom are unchanged.
  • Duplicate an Element — the Element context menu now has a “Duplicate” option. For a container, it deep-copies the whole subtree and inserts the copy right after the original; internal links between duplicated Elements point at each other’s copies, not the originals.
  • Opt an Element out of anchoring — a chain-link toggle on each Element in the outline lets it sit at a fixed offset instead of anchoring to whatever came before it, so a ring of independent parts (bolt holes, pips, etc.) can be arranged without one dragging the others around every time it moves.
  • Ground-reference grid — a faint grid now renders on the model’s base plane in the 3D viewport, purely to help judge scale and orientation. It fades out with distance and only appears once there’s something in the scene.
  • Project Variable values are highlighted — a parametric value driven by a shared Project Variable now gets a subtle accent-tinted background in the Inspector, so it’s visible at a glance which numbers are actually shared instead of independent.

Changed

  • Anchor picker moved into the Inspector — the floating dots you used to click directly on the 3D model to set an anchor point are gone. Anchor points are now set from a grid of position buttons (TL/TR/BL/BR and friends) directly in the Inspector, next to the Element’s other properties.
  • Orientation gizmo restyled — the old colored X/Y/Z lines and bold circular badges have been replaced with a quieter monochrome look: soft grey badges, subtle dotted lines from the center to each axis letter, and better contrast in both light and dark appearance.
  • The orbit joystick and the orientation gizmo now render at exactly the same size — previously they were sized independently and looked slightly mismatched.
  • The Inspector explains anchoring more clearly: if an Element is set to anchor but has nothing to anchor to yet (e.g. every Element before it in its group is also independent), it now says so explicitly instead of looking identical to a working anchor.
  • Settings now opens to the General tab by default, instead of Viewport.
  • Help topics: added screenshots for the Anchor Grid and the Orientation Gizmo, and refreshed the terminology to match what’s actually on screen. Renamed the mislabeled “Left-hand sidebar” topic to “Inspector (right sidebar)”.

Fixed

  • The camera no longer resets to the whole-model zoom level every time you make an edit while zoomed in on a detail. It previously mistook “zoomed in past the auto-frame distance” for “the camera got swallowed by the mesh” and yanked itself back out every time.
  • Panning with the joystick (holding Shift while dragging) moved the camera backwards from the puck’s direction. It now follows the puck the way you’d expect.
  • Deleting a Part with contents inside it could crash. Element deletion now goes through one shared path that always clears selection first, instead of leaving the Inspector trying to read properties off an Element that’s disappearing mid-delete.
  • The Add Element search field didn’t receive keyboard focus when the panel appeared, so you had to click into it before typing. It now focuses automatically.
  • Builder and Documenter windows could come back completely blank after a hard kill and relaunch (e.g. stopping the app from Xcode instead of quitting normally), with no way to recover short of closing and reopening the window. They now fill in correctly on their own.