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November dev update

· 4 min read
Andrés Ortiz Corrales (angrykoala)
Andrés Ortiz Corrales (angrykoala)
Co-creator of My Guitar Tabs

Hello everyone!

This November, we have released a lot of improvements on the overall experience of My Guitar Tabs. Thanks to the feedback from our users. You can check out all the changes in our public changelog. This is available now in the latest version 1.13.7.

New Icons 💅​

Until recently, we relied on Bootstrap Icons for most of our iconography. Bootstrap Icons, however, have not been supported since 2023, and it is no longer recommended by Bootstrap to use.

Because of this, and also for a bit of fun, we decided to move to Material Icons along with Simple Icons:

Before:

Old icons example 1

Old icons example 2

Now:

New icons example 1

New icons example 2

As you can see, these are quite similar to the old icons, but overall they make everything a bit more stylish.

A bit smarter icons​

With these new icons, we have also optimised a bit how we used them. Instead of loading all the icons, we now just bundle the ones we used, letting us keep in check the size of our app, to make sure it doesn't grow too much as we keep adding features.

Zoom support in more devices 🔎​

You may already be familiar with our zoom controls. These let you make your tabs bigger, while still fitting neatly in your screen:

Zoom Controls

However, this didn't work on some devices. This was because under the hood, this zoom used the browser to increase or decrease the size of the app, but only over the tablature, so it was a bit of a hack. Certain browsers, and mobile devices didn't like this.

Piggybacking on the work we did for our new PDFs, we now calculate the zoom ourselves, with an army of little virtual elfs crunching numbers to see how the tabs should look. This means that now, zoom works on any device, always looking nice and sharp:

Zoom at 150% Zoom big

Zoom at 50% Zoom small

Too small meme

Visual Tweaks 🕶️​

We keep making small adjustments to the app, to make sure it looks nice and tidy.

We changed the old "Load Song" button, which wasn't very clear, and instead added it explicitly to a menu next to "Create a new Song":

Create new song button

Bugfixes 🐛​

We keep working on fixing bugs that we find or that our users report:

  • Offline support: My Guitar Tabs works offline!. For a while we had a bug that prevented using My Guitar Tabs offline. This was reported by an user and it's solved now!.
  • Incorrect order of 8 string tuning: Silly mistake. When setting the 8 string guitar, the default tuning was being set to E-B-G-D-A-E-B-F# instead of F#-B-E-A-D-G-B-E. Thanks to Connor Ouellette for reporting this!
  • Range selection out of bounds: It was possible to select outside of the tablature. That was weird and made people sad.

What's next?​

Christmas is just around the corner 🎄!! This means that we'll be taking a bit of break to eat a bit too much chocolate. But we have a few things lined up for release soon-ish:

  • Support for Ghost Notes 👻: The user Tristan Grabski reported that we don't have ghost notes notation, so we are working on adding them. Here is an example on how these will look like: Ghost Note
  • Dark Theme: Rejoice vampires 🧛. We (Well, Dani, since he doesn't let me do visual design anymore) are working on a dark theme. As you can see, it is still not perfect, but we are getting there! Dark Theme
  • Color-coded Songs: This is a feature we implemented very early in My Guitar Tabs, but decided to remove to focus on building the core app. Some users, however, noticed the early screenshots and asked us to add colors to their songs 😭. So now we are working on adding back this feature (and making it awesome). Color Song

We are also working on a couple of secret projects, but hopefully will be available in the following months.

If you want to support the development of My Guitar Tabs, so we can keep bringing cool features, we now have a Patreon 🙏