A month in: notes on v1.3.0
By Zhenghao Chen ·
ColorWander had been on the App Store for a month when version 1.3.0 shipped, on 18 June 2026, just before the Dragon Boat Festival. This note is about that version. The reason the app exists is a separate story: why ColorWander exists.
A receipt, and a calendar
The new layout was the receipt: the paper slip you get everywhere, used here for an ordinary good moment. The calendar had arrived in the version before. Its idea is a wall calendar or a journal page, except the picture is whatever you photographed, however small.
Blur, opacity, rounded corners
A flat block of color gets tiring. 1.3.0 added two blurs, a Gaussian blur and a motion blur. The background of every layout can fade, so the photo shows through the color. Editorial poster, Receipt and Color story can also round the corners of the photo.
Type, and the gallery
People making journals asked for more handwriting. That version added 29 fonts, many of them handwritten or serif, all free to use. The app now has 39 fonts, and every one of them is free. Captions can run to more than one line when the layout has room. The gallery can sort by the time the photo was taken, not only by the time you saved the card. A long-standing bug was fixed: Live Photos were missed when the photo library was limited to selected items.
One product, kept open
The useful kind of fast building stays with one product: find the thing worth making, then keep revising it. Shipping many apps in a month and leaving them is a different habit. Smoother layout switches, faster photo loads and smoother gallery thumbnails were only a start.
