A lot of small things shipped on He.art and Heart Photos this week. None of them needs an announcement on its own, but together they change how a few everyday jobs feel, so here they are in one place, each with where to find it and how to use it.
Tools, and HTML to Text
He.art has a new Tools page, reachable from the sidebar under Tools. These are free tools that run entirely in your browser: nothing you paste leaves your computer.
The first one is HTML to Text. Paste any HTML into the left pane and the right pane fills with its text as you type: every tag, attribute and comment taken out, entities like & turned back into the characters they stand for, and each paragraph, heading, list item and table row on its own line. Scripts and styles are left out entirely. Three switches above the panes let you trim each line, remove empty lines, or keep the addresses of links, and Copy or Download takes the result away with you.
It is handy when you have copied the source of an email or a web page and only want the words.
The Blog now sits in the same part of the sidebar, so you can get here from inside He.art too.
Docs that can draw a review page
Docs in He.art are written in Markdown, and this week that Markdown learned some new marks:
~~struck~~shows words struck through in red, and++added++shows them in green, so a doc can show an edit the way a reviewer would mark it up.:::columnssets blocks side by side (put+++between them), as many as fit, stacking one under another on a phone. With a single block inside, it flows in two newspaper columns, which suits a table of contents.:::details Some summaryhides what follows until the summary is pressed, so a long list can fold away behind a line like "14 more changed passages".:::factsdraws a list as one row of small facts, and:::mutedmakes text quieter.- Every heading can be linked to. Write
[Getting started](#getting-started)and pressing the link scrolls the doc to that heading.
You rarely need to type these by hand. When you copy a page from your browser and paste it into a doc, He.art reads how the page looked, not just its words: a grid becomes columns, a bordered panel becomes a box, struck and inserted words keep their marks, and links inside the page point at the right headings. Switch Markdown on to see what it wrote, and switch it off again to see it drawn.
A few keyboard fixes came with it. Ctrl+Home now takes you to the very top of a doc and Ctrl+End to the very bottom, where before the browser stopped a little short. Pressing PgDn and then PgUp brings you back to exactly where you were, with the cursor in view rather than hidden under the header. Selecting everything and deleting it leaves an empty doc, not a stray heading mark waiting to turn your next words into a title. And a doc without a title now says Untitled, instead of showing the title of the doc you opened before it.
Heart Photos, a little smoother
- B keeps the button bar. In the Heart Photos viewer, press B and the button bar fades in and stays, even while a video plays, until you press B again and it fades away.
- Restore defaults. Every settings menu now calls its reset button Restore defaults, which says better what it does.
- Back from the first photo. Going back from the first photo of a gallery now lands on the last one, not on an empty place one past it.
- Uploads show up at once. When you upload a photo your library already had into a gallery that did not hold it yet, it now appears in that gallery straight away, without a reload.
Try it
Open He.art and paste a page into a new doc to see it drawn, or try HTML to Text on the next email you need the words from. Then open Heart Photos and press B.