Frame Update: Remixing Frames, Cloning Assets, Web Screenshots, and Event Horizon
Greetings Frame community! We've been hard at work on a number of big features, and we just launched a few of them. For those that are new to Frame: welcome. At Frame we try to make it as easy as possible to create and customize your own corner of the metaverse for online events, workspaces, and hangouts. You can get started in a few easy steps here on our home page. Frame works on desktop, mobile, and VR.
We're an ambitious, scrappy team and we want to make the metaverse accessible and delightful to everyone. Let's dive into the updates.
Remix Frames
We took inspiration for this feature from the "Remix" feature on the Glitch platform. On Glitch, it lets you take a Glitch project and quickly make a copy of it for yourself that you can edit separately from the original. In the context of music, of course, remixing is the process of incorporating existing music into new, modified songs.
In Frame, remixing lets you quickly make a copy of a Frame on a new link that you can edit without modifying the original. When you're on a Frame that you created or that you're an admin on, you'll see a new "REMIX THIS FRAME" dropdown in the sidebar. It's pretty straightforward:
Once you click Create, we'll spin up all of that Frame's content into a new Frame with the name that you've chosen.
It gets better, though, if you're in the sharing mood. In your Frame settings, you can choose to make your frame remixable with the new "Allow others to remix?" toggle. Then, anyone who is visiting your Frame who is also logged in will be able to remix your Frame for themselves!
We're going to be making a nice library of Frames for the community to remix, and we hope some of you make your awesome Frames remixable as well.
Clone Assets
This has been a widely requested feature and we're happy to finally deliver it. If you turn on Edit Mode and select an asset, you will see a new button in the Edit Menu that shows up at the bottom left corner. You can click that button to make a quick copy of that asset in your Frame that you can move around as you please without disturbing the original. Here's the button. There are a few asset types that aren't "clonable" yet but most of them are.
Web Screenshot
There's a new asset type you can add using the blue plus button down in your toolbar: Web Screenshot. This was a feature request from Glenn Sanford, the CEO of our parent company.
In a nutshell, Glenn wanted a way to pull a website into Frame so that those in the Frame could see its content, even if it wasn't fully interactive. Of course, it's possible to simply take a screenshot of a website on your own and then add that to Frame as an image, but that takes a few steps. Also, for frequently updating websites, you would need to be taking screenshots pretty often and replacing the image any time you wanted the latest data- a real hassle.
With Web Screenshot, we do a lot of this for you. All you have to do is put in the url of the site and we'll take a screenshot of it for you and bring it into your Frame. When people come into the Frame, it will grab the latest screenshot of the website. You can even turn on Edit Mode and click on the Screenshot and set the "auto-refresh" toggle to force the Web Screenshot to update every minute with a new screenshot. This is super convenient for frequently updating data like stock tickers, weather pages, live charts, and more.
These Web Screenshots are not interactive, so you can't click within them. You can zoom into them, and you can easily open the website in another tab if you want. It's great for static content like Wikipedia articles or content that people don't need or expect to interact with. Also, for long websites we provide a scrollbar. This scrollbar is not synced though, so if you scroll on it then it won't scroll for other users. Depending on how you look at it, that's either a feature or a bug - but we'll give you the option to sync the scroll in the future.
On the overall topic of "bringing the web into Frame" - stay tuned. We have a lot more coming in this area.
Event Horizon
The environment we released in our last update, the Auditorium, is a demonstration of how MASSIVE Frame environments can be, and it hints at some of the scale capabilities coming to Frame later this year. For smaller events where you want things a little bit more contained, we have a gorgeous new environment for you: Event Horizon. Event Horizon is an event space inside of a spaceship. It looks particularly epic when you set a gorgeous photosphere in the background, like I've done here: