Christmas has come early with new updates and one of the most requested features for Magma: public profiles and the ability to follow your friends! Keep reading to find out more!

Unique usernames

With this release, every Magma artist will be automatically assigned a unique username. We’ll try to keep this as close to your display name as possible: ryanallan might become ryanallan01, etc. 

Want to change your username? You’ll be able to update it once per year if you’re on our free plan, or as often as once per week if you’re subscribed to Blaze. 

With the launch of unique usernames, your display names no longer need to be unique. This means that there can be multiple users with the same display name, but they’ll each have different usernames. To avoid confusion with many users on a canvas, you can now hover over another artist’s avatar anywhere in Magma to see their unique username. If you click their username, display name, or avatar, you can access their full profile and read more information about them. 

Public Profile

You can now set up your public profile with a banner image and About Me section. This has been highly requested by our community and will help us lay the groundwork for further features designed to help you connect with other artists and build your network. 

To access your profile, you can tap on your avatar in the right corner and select User Profile. Here, you can write a bio about yourself, add links to your socials or portfolio, add a profile picture and banner, and show off stats like how long you’ve been on Magma. You’ll also be able to share a link to your profile with others by going to your profile page and copying its URL.

Note: If you see a profile that goes against our community guidelines, you can report it to the Magma team. You can read more about how to customize yours in our Public Profile Guide.

Note: While there is a section specifically to link to your website or Linktree, you can also add URLS into your “About Me” section.

User tooltips

You can now hover another artist’s anywhere in Magma to see basic information about them, including their avatar and unique username. If you click their username, display name, or avatar, a new browser tab will open with their full profile. This can also help you confirm the identity of someone with a common display name, as you’ll be able to quickly see their unique username.

Following List & Recent List

Now that creators can have their own profiles, you can also choose to follow the people you meet in Magma. This lets you see if they’re online and actively drawing. 

We’re working on additional permissions but for now, you can choose to hide your online status and drawing status by adjusting the Privacy setting in your Account settings.

In a future release, you’ll also be able to see posts from the friends and artists that you follow. We still need some time on this one, but you can start getting excited about it and share your ideas with us.

Updated New Canvas modal

We know that our artists often want to create artwork of a specific size or for a certain purpose, like A4 format for a printed poster or square dimensions for an Instagram post. 

Now, when you create a new drawing, you’ll have the option to choose from pre-set dimensions. You can also save up to 100 presets of your own for custom projects.

The next aspect of this that we’ll be working on is templates: canvases that have content pre-drawn on them to help guide your work. These could be storyboard templates, drawing exercises, or anything else that you think could be helpful for your creative process! If you have any suggestions for templates you’d love to use, fill out this form to let us know.

Invite Modal enhancements

We’re updating our invite modal to make it even easier to invite and draw with friends. Now, you can:

• Invite friends to your canvas through email

• Instantly invite your followers to a canvas

Once users are invited, they get an in-app notification inviting them to your canvas (if they’re online), as well as an email. If you want to disable those invites, there is a setting in the Privacy section of your Account settings.

Forced GPU switching

From this month onward, we will try to switch all users to GPU rendering mode. While CPU mode relies on your device’s main processing unit to render images, GPU mode uses your device's graphics card, offering faster and more efficient processing for visual tasks. On Magma, GPU rendering offers the best possible experience, especially for larger canvases.

If your device fails to switch to GPU mode (which may be the cause for older devices and mobile phones), you’ll see a notification that you’ve been switched to a legacy mode, which will eventually be disabled. When the legacy CPU mode is fully removed, unsupported devices will no longer be able to edit drawings but will be able to export their artwork from Magma.

Login with X/Twitter

We noticed that many artists share links to their canvases on X (formerly Twitter) to host art events and invite their followers to draw with them. To make it even easier for your Twitter audience to draw with you, we reenabled log-in through Twitter. When you go to the Log in or Sign up pages, you’ll now see an option that says “Continue with X.” Authorize the pop-up and proceed to instantly log in!

Fixed bugs and performance enhancements

We’re always trying to make your Magma experience as smooth as possible. Here are the recent bugs we’ve squashed and improvements we’ve added:

• Fixed an issue with adding existing canvases toa Sequence;

• Fixed some menus auto-closing on Android;

• Changed dropdown menus to dark mode;

• Improved UI of Report modal to let you know that your report is being submitted;

• Fixed some scrolling issues in the dashboard;

• Fixed lasso fill tool preview not displaying with stabilizer off;

We hope you enjoy this update. Happy drawing!