BrickSolvr v1.3.0 - your bricks, your names, your colors

Happy Friday 👋

A brick design is only useful if you can build it from the box you already have. v1.3.0 is about closing that gap — tell BrickSolvr which bricks you own, call the colors what you call them, and the design comes back in your language.

Pick the brick sizes you own

The Brick sizes tab used to be a list of sizes to switch off. That's backwards — nobody keeps a list of the bricks they don't have. Now it's a list of what you do have. Tap the common sizes, or type in anything else you've got, a 4×4, a 1×5, whatever's in the box, and the design is built from those. Leave the list empty and anything goes.

Name your colors

A hex code like #20639b means nothing on a Saturday afternoon with a box of bricks in front of you. "Deep Sea" does. The new Color names tab lets you name any color, and that name shows up on the bricks, in the parts list and in the CSV — and you can type it anywhere a color is asked for. Naming doesn't change which colors your build uses. It just makes them yours.

A color picker that stays put

Picking a color used to hand you over to your browser's own picker — a different one on every machine, and it forgot your preferences the moment you closed it. So we built our own. It remembers whether you like hex, RGB or HSL, and it has an eyedropper for grabbing a color straight off the screen, a photo of a real brick, say.

A better wait — change your mind any time

Waiting used to be a commitment: pick a model, and you were watching that one until it finished. Not any more. Halfway through and you'd rather see the police car? Pick it, and the new one starts on the spot. The sliders and the demo list work while the page is still loading, so you can set your build up before it's even ready for you. And if something does go wrong, you get a plain message and a Try again button instead of a logo spinning forever.

More room on a phone or tablet

Turn your device sideways in full screen and the original and the bricks sit side by side — the comparison worth having, and the one an upright screen can't give you. On iPhone and iPad, adding BrickSolvr to your Home Screen gives you more room still.

Plus tidier tabs on small screens, a parts list that draws each brick size in its own color, and a handful of small fixes.

It's all live now at https://bricksolvr.com — free, in your browser, nothing to install.

Which bricks are in your box? Tell me below, and tell me what you'd like to see next. 👀