Blocs for Mac 5.1 — Build Websites Faster with AI.
What a year so far, in May we released the long awaited Blocs for iPad on the iPad App Store. This huge milestone marked a new era for those who enjoy building websites with Blocs.
Today we are very excited to introduce Blocs for Mac 5.1, this release brings a range of amazing new features to Blocs, that will help you build better websites, even faster.
The Bloc Library 📚
The Bloc Bar is an integral part of the Blocs user interface. When building a website with Blocs, it’s used to add pre-made layout sections with ease. Today we have an amazing new feature coming to the Bloc Bar that is going to elevate how you use this essential part of the Blocs application, in brand new ways.
Blocs 5.1 now supports multiple Bloc libraries within the Bloc Bar, which 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.
Building a custom Bloc library is super easy, you can read all about creating and managing them on this dedicated knowledge base post.
If you don’t have time to create your own library, you may want to check out the Minimalist Library. It’s a huge 3rd party, pre-made Bloc library designed to supercharge your web design workflow. Created by our friends over at Blocs Master, it’s built to work perfectly with the new Bloc 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.
AI Assistant 🧠
Unless you have been living under a rock, you will have almost certainly felt the huge buzz around AI (Artificial Intelligence) and its potential implementation into our day to days lives.
AI is disrupting various industries including web design and you know us, we always try our best to keep up to date with tech, so it will come as no surprise that we have implemented AI into Blocs to help you build websites even faster.
The new AI Assistant brings the power of AI into the Blocs design environment, it can be used to generate and edit the content within a Blocs project.
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.
In order to use ChatGPT with Blocs you will need an Open AI API key, you can get one by creating an account with Open AI.
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.
You can read more about the Blocs AI Assistant and setting it up here.
Eventus Site Template 🎆
Blocs 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.
In Blocs 5.1 we are introducing a gorgeous new event site template we call Eventus. This template has been carefully crafted to work perfectly with Quick Start and is a great choice for summer festival and event websites.
SMTP Forms ✉️
Blocs has always supported building websites with contact forms, over the years we have expanded the functionality of Blocs to allow users to manage forms in much greater detail, with features such as, form validation, custom posting, custom redirects and support for reCAPTCHA (spam protection).
Today we are introducing another huge improvement to forms. Blocs now supports building websites that post their contact form data using SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). For some hosting companies, SMTP form posting has become a requirement when collecting data via a website contact form. With this new functionality Blocs delivers even greater flexibility when building websites that depend on forms and data collection.
You can read more about switching your forms to SMTP on this dedicated knowledge base post.
Productivity⚡️
It’s not always the show stopping features that make the biggest impact, sometimes it’s the little productivity features that can make a world of difference to your day to day work!
In Blocs for Mac 5.1 we have added a range of smaller new features we think will make creating your next web site with Blocs even faster, such as the ability to re-order Global Colour Swatches in the new colour picker popover.
We also added eight brand new navigation layout Blocs, some fancy typography controls on the project notes window and some handy CSS Grid template fields to the Class Editor.
As well as all of that, we also fixed a bunch of bugs and updated the Bootstrap 5 framework & jQuery Javascript library to the latest versions.
Get Blocs 5.1 🎁
Blocs 5.1 is a solid update we know Blocs users are going to love. We are very proud of how it’s turned out!
Special thanks to all who helped to test this version of Blocs. 🙌
You can check out the full release notes for Blocs for Mac 5.1 here.
The Blocs for Mac 5.1 update is free to all Blocs 5 users, you can read all about updating here. If you’re currently using an older version of Blocs for Mac or looking to start using Blocs 5 for Mac, we have some more great news to share! 👇
Summer Sale ☀️
To celebrate the launch of Blocs for Mac 5.1, we will be running our summer sale, which will officially start tomorrow Tuesday (4th July 2023) and end on Friday (7th July 2023–23:59 BST).
It’s rare you get brand new software, this good at such a low price!
You do not want to miss this 😎
What’s Next? 👀
What a year so far, we released Blocs for iPad in May, then followed up with the brand new, feature packed Blocs for Mac 5.1 in June. But we still have more surprises in store for 2023. We will be back in September with more exciting news for the Blocs community 😎
Until then, we hope you all have a wonderful summer and don’t forget to grab yourself a summer bargain in our summer sale, which starts tomorrow.💜
