Changelog

Liking a material used to mean leaving Conc. You opened your mail app, typed the material's name and your project from scratch, and the reply ended up somewhere in your inbox. Which project you had asked for it was something only you remembered.

Now you can ask from the material's page. The inquiry and the reply stay on the board where that material lives.

• Send it from the page: Press "Ask about this material" at the top of the supplier card and a form opens. Pick the project (a board), give a rough quantity or area, when you need it, and a message, and you are done. Conc puts the material's photo and name in the email for you. Your name, company, and phone are asked once and remembered.

• Replies arrive in two places: The supplier's answer comes to your inbox and shows on the material's board card as "Asked 9/15 · Replies 1". Open the thread from the card to read it with any attachments and reply right there. The same thread opens from the material's page under "View inquiry thread", and answering from your mail app lands in it too.

• What you ask about gets saved: Sending an inquiry puts the material on the board you picked. If you have no board yet, one is made on the spot. You never end up having asked about a material that is on no board.

• Several materials from one board: Pick a few materials on a board and a bar appears below them; press "Ask suppliers" there and they go out grouped by supplier, one email each. Quantities go per material, say 200 m² of floor tile and 30 wall panels, while the timing and message are written once.

Next time a material catches your eye, try asking.

Explore handled one material at a time. Weighing three you liked meant three detail pages and a lot of tab switching, and saving them meant three separate bookmarks.

Color and texture do not compare well from memory. They have to sit next to each other. Now you can pick on Explore first and decide afterwards.

• Pick from the card: Every card has a check on it now. Press it and the card gets a blue frame, and a bar at the bottom of the screen counts what you have picked. Once one is picked, pressing anywhere on a card picks it too, so there is nothing to aim for. Mixtapes and archives can be picked alongside.

• Compare side by side: Compare on the bar lays your picks out in one table: price, dimensions, how to order, brand, supplier, and tags, one column each. Only rows with something in them are drawn, so the table stays short. Dropping one and comparing again happens in the same window.

• Refill the grid with more like them: The samples tab refills with materials that share what your picks have in common. Anything from the same suppliers as your picks is left out, since the series you are already looking at is not what you are after. Your category and color filters still apply on top.

• Save or draw: Save to board puts everything you picked on a board at once. Draw opens a mood board or a room with those materials already in place. What used to be save first, then go to the tool is one step. On a mixtape you can pick just a few tracks and save those.

Your picks stay on the bar at the bottom of the screen. Compare, drop one, compare again, then save, all without leaving Explore. Put a check on a few materials that catch your eye.

A material's page hands you a flattened image of its surface. Finding out which materials have one, though, meant opening them one at a time.

About half the catalogue carries them, and nothing in the list said which half. Now you can gather them in Explore.

• Keep only the ones with resources: A switch has joined the filters. Turn it on and you are left with the materials whose surface has been flattened into an image, ready for a mood board or a 3D render.

• Every filter folds to a row: Category and color are one row each now, and pressing either unfolds it in place. What used to sit below the scroll fits on a 13-inch laptop screen. A folded row still says what is inside it — material covers and color families drift past while nothing is picked, and the row names your choice once you have made one.

• Conditions continue inside the category: Pick a broad category and the same panel becomes the conditions within it. Choose wallpaper and its kinds follow, with use and property still there to add. Adding a condition used to sit at the very bottom of the filter column; it now lives inside the category you just picked.

• What is on sits under the search box: The conditions narrowing the grid are right below where you type. On a phone they are visible without opening the filters, and you can drop them one at a time from there.

Available on Pro. Open Explore and start with the switch.

Making a mood board began with having materials saved. That meant a trip to Explore to gather them, back to the tool to begin, and another trip when one was missing.

Now you can start with nothing saved at all.

• Laid out before you type: The material chooser now opens onto the whole catalogue. You pick by eye instead of reaching for a word first.

• Reach it by color: Press a color or a material type to narrow what you see. A finish you cannot quite name is still one press away: gray brings up exposed concrete, stucco and terrazzo together.

• Swap without closing: What you have picked sits along the top, with dashes for the places still to fill. You can take one out and put another in while the grid is still in front of you.

Available on Pro. Open a tool and start with a color.

Gathering candidates goes in a loop: open a material, go back to the list, change the search, try again. Narrow by flooring, or by olive? The next term is a guess every time.

Now you can go from the material in front of you straight to the next one, without the trip back.

• What this material is: The rare properties, the ones that pin it down, sit near the centre; the ones the whole catalogue carries sit out at the edge. The closer in, the more it is what makes this material itself.

• Press to narrow: Press one of the inner marks and the list below becomes materials carrying that property. Moving to another property, or back to all of them, is one press either way.

• Similar mood: Not the same category, but the same feel. You will meet a tile while looking at a wallpaper, and the heading names the colour family the row was gathered on.

• What a mixtape is made of: What its materials share and where they part is now drawn on the mixtape page. Point at a material and lines run to the properties it carries. Below that are other mixtapes made of the same materials, gathered under each one. A mixtape whose materials never vary shows the summary without the drawing.

The related rows are laid out as one sheet now, so everything arrives on screen instead of waiting behind a sideways scroll.

Open a material and start with the mark nearest the centre.

Saving the materials was never the end of it. There was still downloading them one by one to lay out in Keynote, guessing at how the combination would actually read, and telling a client "I'll show you next week." All three now happen here.

• Make a mood board: Pick your materials and the samples come back laid out in one photograph. No more pulling them down one at a time to arrange by hand.

• Draw it as a room: Pick a few, say where each one goes, and the combination comes back as a room. It answers "do these work together" without opening a renderer.

• Apply to a photo: Choose one surface of a photo you took on site and a material to put there, and that surface comes back changed. "This floor, but in that material" stops being something you describe and becomes something you show.

When a client says the wall looks too dark, you can redraw it while you're both still sitting there instead of promising it for next week. What you make is kept in the Artifacts tab of your library, so it's there when you come back. For mood only, though: a finished room will differ, and a material may look different in hand.

Available on Pro. Start from home, which now asks what you want to make.

Finding the material was never the hard part — what came after was. Screenshot the page, crop out the angle, wrestle it onto a mood board. Now you can take it straight from the material page.

The surface, flattened into an image. Shot head-on, so nothing tilts when you place it and no lighting sits on top of it. It goes into a proposal exactly as it is.

What you need for 3D comes along. Files describing the surface relief and how light scatters across it are in the same download, ready for SketchUp, D5, or Enscape. Renderers disagree on which way to read a relief map, so both versions are included and either one will work.

One download, five files. They arrive as a folder named after the material, with a small file recording its reference size and gloss reading — so it still makes sense months later.

Made from the material's own video. Every material in Conc carries a short clip of the real sample, filmed in hand. The angle shifts as it's shot, which is what separates the surface's real texture from the light falling on it — and it's how the gloss gets read, by watching where the highlight travels. They are generated images, so expect some difference from the material in hand.

About one material in two is ready today. It starts with opaque materials that have a pattern — tile, wood, stone, plaster, paint, textile — and leaves out the ones whose whole character is transmission or reflection, where what gets filmed is the room around the sample rather than the surface itself. Where a material is ready, you'll find design resources on its page.

Available on Pro. Open a material you like and take a look.

You know the moment: you're looking at a reference shot and stop on "what is that floor?" Now you can drop that photo into a conversation.

• Read surface by surface: A single photo gets read as floor, wall, ceiling, furniture, and openings.

• Get on the same page first: Before the search starts, you'll see how the photo was read, one line per surface. Carry on as-is, or put it right in a sentence — "the window on the right is a translucent panel" — and it looks again with your name for it.

• Reasons come with the results: Every surface comes back with materials that suit it and why each one fits, picked so the tones of wall, floor, and furniture don't fight each other.

• You don't need the right word: Some textures are hard to name. Conc searches by what the photo shows as well, so materials with the same character turn up even when the words miss.

• See it in a finished space: A name and a swatch don't always tell you enough. When Conc has a space that actually used the material, it comes back alongside the candidate.

• Carry it over to a board: Surfaces become the board's sections, and the reasoning stays as a note on each material. Even for replies without surfaces — a material close-up, say — everything found can go to a board in one go.

When nothing similar turns up for a surface, it says so, and so does a surface the photo was too unclear to read with confidence. Results stay in the conversation, so they're waiting when you come back. Start with whatever reference is on your desk right now.

Boards used to be where you collect materials. Anything beyond that took workarounds: judgment calls tucked into memos, rejected materials deleted outright. That work is now built into the board. Narrow candidates down to a final pick, right where you collected them.

Give each material a status: shortlist, on hold, selected, or excluded. Leave a short reason while you're at it, so calls like "fits the budget" or "lead time too long" stay visible right on the card.

The board follows along. Counts per status sit at a glance, and when candidates pile up, try viewing just the shortlist. Selected materials get a stamp on their card and gather in a summary at the top. Instead of deleting a rejected material, mark it excluded: it folds away below the board, and unfolds right back where it was.

The same material can be judged differently per project. What makes the shortlist on one project may not on another. So statuses stay separate on every board.

Sections are here too. Try splitting a board into wall, floor, and lighting, or any name you like. Names are free-form, so "references" or "ground-floor hall" work just as well. Materials move between sections as you drag them, and grabbing a section title reorders the sections themselves.

Every status change is recorded automatically: who, when, which material, and why. Your team's decision trail builds up as part of the project. Start with your next decision. Make it on the board.

Narrowing materials in Explore meant opening one lookalike box after another. Now you don't have to.

Start with a material category. Going into a broad family — wood, tile, textile — was already the move people made most often when filtering, so it's the first step on screen now.

Everything else lives behind "add condition". Use, finish, property, form, and brand each had their own box; now they share one you can search. Knowing the name is enough, even when you don't know which family it belongs to. What you pick stays on screen as a tag. You can see what's on at a glance and drop them one at a time.

When there's a lot to look through, "try narrowing by" appears above the results. It only offers conditions that would actually cut the list down.

A handful of smaller things you meet while filtering got tidied up along the way.

A new version of Conc is here. We rebuilt the interface and everything underneath it to keep up with how the work is changing, and it came out simpler and more direct.

• Search by conversation: Come start a conversation. Describe a project in a line or drop in a reference image, and we'll show you materials that fit, along with why they fit — matched by mood and texture rather than spec sheets. If something isn't right, keep asking and narrow it down; the ones you like go straight to a board.

• Explore: We remade search and filters and redesigned the pages for materials and content. Plenty of smaller things you meet along the way got attention too. What you're looking for should turn up faster.

• Brought into boards: The places you kept materials had grown into a few separate things; now they all come together in boards. What notes, recently viewed, and field trips used to do is now handled by boards, and everything you saved in your mixtapes carried over into boards as well. What you kept in those older places is still yours — open Settings, find your earlier data, and download a copy.

Honestly, there are still rough edges. We'll keep smoothing them out from here, so if you run into something odd, tell us! Email, Instagram, or the chat inside the app — whichever is easiest.