Blocs 2023 Recap — Making the Best Mac Website Builder, Even Better and Bringing it to iPad.
Our small team has done it again! 2023 has been one of our most productive years to date. We delivered a huge number of new features and improvements to Blocs for Mac 5, released Blocs for iPad and also published a range of new Blocs training materials.
To celebrate such a productive year, we created a 2023 recap promo video that showcases some of the best new features and improvements we released in the last 12 months!
New Blocs Store 🛒
We kicked off 2023 by giving the Blocs Store a long overdue refresh, with lots of improvements to the entire platform including product analytics for 3rd party developers.
The Chart Bric 📊
We followed up the redesign of the Blocs Store with the release of a brand new custom Bric that made adding charts to the websites you create with Blocs, a breeze. The Chart Bric brings the power of the open source javascript library charts.js to Blocs. With support for bar, line, pie, doughnut, polar and radar chart types, this Bric can be used in a variety of ways to display a wide range of data on your website.
Blocs for iPad 📱
Back in January 2022, we announced Blocs was coming to iPad. After a year of testing, improving and refining, we finally released Blocs for iPad on the 30th of May 2023.
This was a huge milestone and marked a new era for building websites with Blocs.
AI Assistant 🧠
Unless you have been living under a rock, you will have almost certainly felt the huge buzz around AI (Artificial Intelligence) in 2023.
With the release of Blocs for Mac 5.1 in July, we introduced the Blocs AI assistant, to help you build websites even faster.
The assistant uses local sentence recognition to carry out basic tasks but can be expanded to leverage the intelligence of ChatGPT, to deliver more accurate responses and additional AI capabilities such as code generation and grammar checking.
The AI Assistant also supports voice commands similar to Siri. The “Hey Blocs” function can be enabled via the Assistant options pane. Once enabled, you can trigger an input command using the wake phrase “Hey Blocs” followed by your command.
The Bloc Library 📚
With the release of Blocs for Mac 5.1, we also added support for multiple Bloc libraries within the Bloc Bar. This means you can organise all of your Blocs into your own custom Bloc collections and easily switch between them when building, taking your web design workflow to a new level of efficiency.
Our friends over at Blocs Master also designed and built the first ever 3rd party custom Blocs library Minimalist which works great with the new library feature.
As well as the introduction of the Bloc library feature, Blocs for Mac 5.1 also adds support to re-order your favourite Blocs using the new organise mode.
Search Bric V2 🔍
In October, we released V2 of our Site Search Bric with new features and improvements. The best thing about this brand new version is, it’s totally free to all Site Search Bric V1 users.
Horizontal Scroll Container ⬅️ ➡️
With the release of Blocs for Mac 5.2 in early December, we introduced a brand new container option that makes adding horizontal scrollable areas a breeze. With just a few clicks, you can now switch long lists of content into horizontally scrollable lists, saving vertical space and making your web page designs more organised and easier on the eye.
Share Preview over Airdrop 📡
With Blocs for Mac 5.2, you can also now quickly and easily share the preview of the website that you are working on in Blocs over Air Drop, to any other Apple devices such as iPhones, iPads and Macs. Perfect for testing responsive design features on actual devices or sharing progress on the website you’re building with other colleagues in your office.
New Site Templates 🎆
Blocs for Mac 5 was the first version of Blocs to come with pre-made site templates. These templates are designed to take advantage of the Blocs Quick Start feature that allows designers to quickly and easily customise the site template in various ways before they add their own content.
This year we have added two new gorgeous site templates to Blocs for Mac. Eventus, a stunning event template and Kaden, a beautiful, minimalist e-commerce template.
Training Videos 🎓
Learning how to use Blocs couldn’t be easier, we offer all users free access to our extensive online knowledge base and the indispensable Blocs Academy, which is packed with over 100 free training videos.
This year the team worked their socks off to re-record and refresh almost all of our video training content to feature the new Blocs 5 user interface.
Bugs Fixes🪳
The web is constantly evolving, any app in this space that is not issuing improvements, optimisations and fixing bugs regularly, is simply not moving forward!
As well as all of the fabulous new features we released, it’s also worth mentioning that, in 2023 our small team issued a whopping 196 bug fixes and improvements to Blocs 5.
Get Blocs 5 and Blocs for iPad 🎁
If you’re still using Blocs V4, grab your upgrade discount and start building better websites with Blocs 5 today.
If you have an iPad, then you should also check out Blocs for iPad, it takes building websites to a whole new level of flexibility.
What’s Next? 👀
2024 is going to be a huge year for Blocs, we will be celebrating the tenth anniversary since Blocs was originally released. With that in mind, we have big plans for Blocs on both Mac and iPad as well as some other little surprises (lookout for a teaser in the 2023 recap video). 😉
We can’t wait to show you what’s coming next! 🤩
Finally, thanks to all who have helped to test Blocs this year and to all of those who continue to support us! 💜
