What's new

8 September 2026

Added

• You can put the counters back in a window of their own. They sit in the current row card by default on a laptop, which keeps them off the row you are working. If you would rather have the movable window, "Open in a window" under the counters gives it back, and Rowline remembers the choice. The window now picks a corner clear of the row you are on instead of always taking the bottom right. "Move into the row card" in the window puts them back.
• The welcome card says Rowline is in beta. The first screen described what Rowline does and nothing about the state it is in, so anyone arriving on a forwarded link met an unfinished app as though it were finished. It now says so on the way in, and asks for the one thing that helps most: a row that looks wrong.

Fixed

• The pace estimate and the chart tap hint are no longer missing on a laptop. "About 40 minutes left" and "Tap a stitch in the chart to move the counter there" only ever lived in the counters window, so when the counters moved into the row card they were left behind. They move with the counters now.
• The stitch and repeat counters look like part of the card they now sit in. On a laptop window they had been landing in the left-hand column of the current-row card, squashed to one side with the buttons beside them and a stack of empty space around them. They now fill the card, sit side by side when there is room for both, and drop back to one under the other when there is not.
• The chart's view note keeps its label when you fold it. The note above the chart drew its own name in a different colour and weight depending on whether it was folded, and neither matched the same note above your rows. All three now look like the one label they are.
• The signed-in dot on the phone account icon sits flat on the button. Its ring was a shade off the button's own colour, which read as a faint halo in dark mode.
• The line above your rows is a quiet note again. The note naming the view you are in ("Working Chart", "Rows / Standard Crochet") lost its card two releases ago and had been rendering as heading-sized bold text with no box, so it shouted over the pattern underneath it. It is back to the small tinted strip it shares with the chart panel's matching note.
• The pattern's credit no longer looks like a link. "From the pattern" names text quoted from the pattern itself, with nowhere to point, but it was styled exactly like the "Imported from" link sitting next to it. It now reads as plain text, so the one line you can tap is the one that looks tappable.

6 September 2026

Added

• Choose your own yarn colours. More > Yarn colours lists every colour code the pattern uses and lets you set the colour you are actually working in. The change reaches the written rows, the chart and the fabric preview together, and it is kept with the project. Each code says where its colour came from, so a colour Rowline picked as a stand-in never looks like one the pattern chose. The pattern's own words are never rewritten: a row that says Color A still says Color A. Colours the pattern names in words, like "change to green", are left alone, because there the word is the instruction.
• Float the pattern on top of everything else. In Chrome and Edge, More > Float on top moves the pattern into a small window that stays above your other apps, so you can follow it over a film without giving it half the screen. It is the same pattern, not a copy: marking rows off, the keyboard shortcuts and the chart all work in there, and closing the window puts everything back. Safari and Firefox have no way to do this yet, so the button is not shown there rather than offered and broken.
• Compact view, for following in a small window. Turn it on from More and Rowline drops the header, the project panel and the rest of the toolbar, leaving the row you are on, its controls, and the panel you picked. It fits a window small enough to sit beside a film, and it shows one row at a time so there is nothing else to read. Everything is still there when you turn it off, and a wide chart still pans sideways as it always did.

Changed

• The chart's zoom control reads the right way round. It used to say "− Zoom 100 +", with the word wedged between the minus button and the number. It now says "Zoom − 100 +".
• The two numbers on the import review now say what they are counting. The summary line and the "Rows to check" list both said "1 warning" while the footer called the same number "1 flagged row", and the banner above them counted something else again as "2 things to check". Flagged rows are now called flagged rows everywhere, and the banner counts checks. Two different numbers on that screen are two different things, and it should be possible to see that at a glance.
• "Progress" is now "Counters". The panel counts rows, stitches and repeats; the old name had people opening it expecting a completion bar.
• The chart gets its space back. The paragraph explaining what kind of chart you are looking at now folds behind its own label, the way the written panel's already does. It is one click away, and a chart that has something to warn you about still says so in full.
• The first screen shows a chart instead of describing one. Opening Rowline for the first time used to mean reading about a hundred words about how it works before seeing anything. The welcome card now says what Rowline is in one line, shows an example stitch chart, and gets out of the way. Nothing was lost: the review screen already promises that Rowline never fills in a row it couldn't read, and says it where your extracted rows are in front of you and you can check it. The "Add to Home Screen" tip moved next to Saved projects, which is what it is about.
• The toolbar now shows at a glance which buttons do something and which are switches. Save and a switched-on view button were painted almost the same purple, so the one control you never want to miss did not stand out from the view you happened to be in. A solid purple button now means an action, and only Save and Mark row done are one. Project, the view switch and Progress read as on through a soft tint instead. Progress also used to look switched on when it was off, which hid the difference; it now rests like the buttons beside it.
• Several controls now say what they do. On a phone, the More tab held the yarn, hook and notes form, while a different More button on the follow screen held the screen and keyboard settings: one word for two unrelated things. That tab is now Yarn & notes, and the tab beside it is Saved projects rather than Library, which is what every other screen already called it. Keys is now Keyboard shortcuts, Jump is now Current row, and Reset, which sits next to Save and clears the pattern, is now Start over.
• The usage-sharing checkbox reads the right way round. It used to say "Don't share anonymous usage steps", so ticking the box stopped the thing the box was named after. It now says "Share anonymous usage steps": ticked means sharing. Nothing about your existing choice changed, only how it is written.

Fixed

• The Counters panel no longer sits on top of the row you are working on. On a narrower desktop window it floated over the right-hand side of the pattern, and the row it covered was usually the current one. The counters now sit inside the current-row card on those widths, next to the row they are counting. A wide window keeps the floating panel, and resizing between the two carries them across without closing them.
• The panel no longer says nothing is imported while a pattern is on screen. On a first visit Rowline loads a sample so there is something to look at, and the line beside it read "Nothing imported yet". It now says what is actually there.
• An empty Saved projects list stops offering things it cannot do. With nothing saved, the search box, the sort menu and Download backup are put away, leaving the explanation and Restore backup, which is the one button that can change the situation. They all come back as soon as there is a project, and the dialog no longer opens with the cursor on a box that is not there.
• The import review says a warning once, not twice in a row. A yellow bar sat directly above the "Rows to check" list repeating the same count and the same advice the list already gave. The bar now appears only when it has something the list cannot say, which on the sample patterns means it went from showing on ten of them to one.
• The import review no longer tells you it cleaned a pattern it did not clean. Pasting a pattern produced a card saying "Rowline cleaned this pasted pattern before import", followed by "No page clutter removed. Nothing saved for review", followed by a confidence score for a web page that was never involved. When there is nothing to report, the card is simply not there, which also brings the flagged rows further up the screen. Importing from a website still shows it, because there Rowline really does decide where the pattern starts and stops.
• "Row 4 may be missing", not "Rows 4". The missing-row note always used the plural, even when it named a single row.
• Dark mode: the card that flags a problem with an import is readable again. On the review screen, the "Rows to check" card and the row warnings inside it were painted in a dark amber meant for a cream background, on a panel that turns dark brown in dark mode. The result was text you could barely make out, on the one card whose whole job is to tell you which row Rowline could not read. The same fault was quietly affecting the export warning, the manual stitch-count feedback and the unsaved marker in Saved projects. All of them now take their colour from the theme, so they read in both.
• Two controls on a phone are big enough to tap. The link that takes you to a flagged row on the review screen, and the row name in the follow bar, were both under the size a fingertip reliably hits. The review checklist has a little more room around each line as a result, which makes a flagged check easier to read as well as easier to reach.
• A long chart scrolls smoothly again. On a pattern with hundreds of rows the chart was drawing every cell of every row at once, which made scrolling stutter badly even though only a couple of hundred cells were ever on screen. Rowline now draws the rows near the screen and fills the rest in as you reach them. Nothing about the pattern changes: every row is still there, still labelled, still counted, and the row you are working on is always drawn wherever you have scrolled to.
• The chart no longer runs off the side of the screen where you cannot reach it. In Split view with the project panel open, on a window narrower than about 1280px, the chart panel extended past the right edge with no way to scroll to it: at 1000px wide, 272px of it was simply unreachable. Those widths now put the chart below the written rows instead of beside them. Folding the project panel still gives you both side by side, because that frees the room.
• Setting your own yarn color now actually changes it. Choosing a color in More > Yarn colors only repainted the fabric preview: the written rows and the chart carried on showing the pattern's color, so for most of the screen nothing appeared to happen. All three now change together, which is what the feature was for.
• "Yarn colors", not "colours". The rest of Rowline says Color; this one screen had picked up the British spelling.
• One colour name now means one colour. Rowline carried two lists of colour names that disagreed with each other: of the 26 names on both, only 8 matched. Black was one shade in the chart's colour reader and another everywhere else, and so were plum, cream, navy, rose and thirteen more. Which part of the app you were looking at decided which shade you got. There is one list now.
• The fabric preview no longer shows colours your pattern never mentions. It worked out colours in its own way, separately from the written rows and the chart, and it did not understand the common legend shape where a pattern lists A = Black without the word "colour". On those patterns it fell back to Rowline's stand-in swatches: the rows tinted Color B white because the pattern says white, while the preview beside them drew it gold. Checked across Rowline's test patterns, 33 of 70 disagreed. They all agree now, and where a colour name is spelled differently in two places the rows' colour is the one that wins.
• A small window is usable at all now. Below a certain width Rowline stacks the project panel above the pattern, so shrinking the window pushed the rows off the bottom: in a 700 by 450 window the first row sat about two screens down, with nothing to see without scrolling. Once you are following a pattern, a window that short now switches to compact view on its own.

5 September 2026

Added

• Tap a stitch on any row, not just the one you are on. Tapping a run of stitches in the row you are following already moved the counter to it. Now you can tap a run in any row: Rowline moves you to that row and stands you at that stitch in one go, instead of tapping the row and then tapping the stitch. The highlight still shows on only one row, because the counter still runs on one row at a time, and a row whose stitch runs do not add up to its own count still offers nothing to tap.
• Rows glow when you point at them. Hovering a row now draws a soft halo around the card instead of only tinting its border, so it is clear which row you are about to tap. The row you are following keeps its own deeper lift underneath.
• Click the Rowline mark for a little yarn. A small burst of loops and stitches in Rowline's colours. It does nothing else, and it stays still for anyone whose device asks for reduced motion.

Changed

• The follow toolbar is quieter. It carried ten controls side by side, eleven once a multi-piece pattern added the Section menu, and it broke onto a second line on most laptop windows. Keep awake, Vibrate and the keyboard shortcuts card are set once or read once, so they now sit behind a single More button, and the row of buttons is grouped into three: what you have made, what you are looking at, and the session. Everything you reach for mid-row stayed where it was, including the Split / Written / Chart switch, Section and Progress.
• "Ready" no longer takes up room. The save status held space in the toolbar to say nothing, with the Save button right beside it. It now appears only when it has something to tell you. Warnings, including a failed save, are unaffected.

Fixed

• Written and Chart view keep the whole page once you mark a row done. Marking your first row folds the project panel away to give the pattern more room, but in Written-only or Chart-only view that freed space was being split between two columns when only one of them was showing. The pattern shrank to roughly half the window, with the other half left empty, at the exact moment you started following. It now keeps the full width.

21 August 2026

Changed

• The read-aloud voice picker no longer sits on top of the current-row card. Turning on Read aloud adds a Voice strip above the rows, and its dropdown was pressed flat against the green current-row card below it, so the two read as one jumbled block. It now leaves the same gap the heading above it does.
• The anonymous beta events can now name more of the places people arrive from, and can tell "never found the import buttons" apart from "opened the file picker and stopped." Nothing more is sent about any visit. The one word saying which door you came in by can now be one of nineteen instead of ten, so LoveCrafts, Etsy, Ko-fi, TikTok, Bluesky, Threads, Discord, a forwarded email and an AI assistant are named rather than collapsed into "other"; a link forwarded through Yahoo Mail, and a visit sent by Gemini, were both being counted as search traffic, and are not any more. The address of the page you came from still never leaves your device, and the list of words is still fixed. There is also one new event, sent when an import button is pressed, so it is possible to see people who opened an import and went no further. Which of the four buttons was pressed is not recorded. The privacy page lists all nineteen words and all nine events, as it did before.
• Rowline's own automated checks no longer count themselves as visitors. The anonymous beta events could not tell a person from a browser Rowline drives itself, so the routine checks that load every page after a deploy were recorded as ordinary visits. On the About page about nine in ten recorded visits were Rowline's own tooling. Automated browsers are now skipped, which sends less rather than more, and leaves the counts describing people.

13 August 2026

Changed

• The pattern gets the room, once you are following one of your own. On a 1280 by 720 laptop the follow screen showed about one and a half rows at a time: a third of the window went to the project panel (Import, the title, the sample picker, the saved library, the yarn notes), none of which you touch between one row and the next, and that squeezed the written column down to its smallest allowed width. Import a pattern now and that panel folds away, with a Project button in the toolbar to bring it back whenever you want it. The freed width goes to the words rather than the chart, which is the half that is easy to miss: the written column had a maximum of its own, so without lifting it the space all went to the chart and the rows saw none of it. Both panels end up wider than before. About two and a half rows at a time on that laptop, four and a half on a larger one.

Added

• A pattern imported from a website now shows who the page says wrote it. Above the rows you will see where the pattern came from and, underneath it, the author the page declares, for example "From the page: Mira Vance". It is on the exported copy too. Rowline reads this from the information a site publishes about its own posts, not from anything on the visible page, which matters more than it sounds: the comments underneath a pattern are full of names, and one real page we tested carries fourteen of them. Those are readers, not the designer, and Rowline will not mistake one for the other. It says "From the page" rather than "Designed by" on purpose. The page is telling us who wrote the post, and on a designer's own blog that is the designer, but on a round-up site it may be an editor who published someone else's pattern, so Rowline reports what it was told and does not upgrade it into a claim about who designed the thing. Pages that declare nothing still show where the pattern came from and simply say nothing about an author, which is also what happens when you paste a page in as text.
• A PDF pattern now shows the credit the designer printed in it. Designers put their name in their patterns, and Rowline used to throw it away: the credit is tidied out of the rows along with the page numbers and the copyright small print, because it isn't part of the instructions. Rowline now reads it before that tidying happens, and shows it above the rows as, for example, "From the pattern: Sabrina Paz". It's on the exported copy too, so a pattern you share or print carries its credit with it. Rowline quotes the line the pattern actually prints rather than picking a name out of it, because plenty of patterns credit both a person and a studio and choosing between them would be guesswork. That is also why it says "From the pattern" and never "Designer": what's printed is a studio or a copyright holder about as often as it is a person, and the label shouldn't claim more than it knows. Patterns that credit nobody show nothing, which is the honest answer rather than a gap. Website imports are unchanged for now; a web page states its author in a different and better place, and that is worth doing properly on its own.

Fixed

• Tapping a row no longer switches the keyboard off. The space bar and the arrow keys stopped working the moment you clicked on a row, which is the most ordinary thing there is to do on the follow screen: you tap the row you are on, then reach for space to mark it done, and nothing happens. Clicking the background behind the rows brought them back, so it looked like the keys were unreliable rather than following a rule. The cause was a guard meant to keep the shortcuts out of the way of buttons: a row is treated as a button so that anyone working through the pattern by keyboard alone can tab to a row and pick it, and clicking a row left it in that state. Space and the arrows now work wherever you clicked last. Nothing was lost on the keyboard side: tab to a row you are not on and space still selects it, and enter still does on any row.