These entries cover improvements to Dexes itself: what it can do, how it looks and how it behaves. Changes to plans, prices and account limits are not listed here; the current plans are on the home page. Dexes is still in development, so some weeks are large.
October 19, 2026
Covering October 12 to 18
Tabletop stories got a Sessions page, where the table agrees when to play. A GM sets a session or a repeating series, everyone answers Going, Maybe or Can't, and anyone can propose times for the others to vote on, with a grid showing when the whole table is free. Each member keeps a weekly pattern of when they can play, can link a calendar so its busy times count without saying what they are, and can add the story's sessions to their own calendar through a private feed. The table is told by a notice in the app and, for each kind of event, by an email you can switch off in your profile. A reminder goes out before each session, and now arrives even when the clock that sends it runs late. Every session can be linked to the Codex objects, Tome pages, ideas and story days it was about, with notes only the GM sees, and the record of past sessions is kept for good.
Sharing a story now asks the other person first: an invitation waits at the top of their library, saying who sent it and the role, and they join only when they accept it. Dexes also emails them once to say they are invited, up to thirty such emails a month for each account, with the count shown in the share dialog. A security review of the whole site landed the same week: analytics loads only after you allow it, uploaded photos lose their location and camera data before they are stored, the writing editor is served from Dexes rather than a third party, and a long list of smaller hardenings. The Terms and Privacy Policy were updated to match.
On a phone, the library folds to its header once a story is open and glides back when you ask, the open story's buttons are a tidy grid of labelled tiles, and the side bars fold their last buttons behind a More button when the screen is too short for all of them. Every menu off a side bar opens beside it, a long press shows a cue before it fires, a section folds a few pixels rather than its whole height, the whole app is set in one typeface, small text is never faint, and Delete, Close and Discard each have one fixed place in every editor. The map's layer list scrolls while you drag past its edge, the tutorial notices your action the moment you take it, and Sessions sits just above Game Master in the right bar.
October 12, 2026
Covering October 5 to 11
The Stories page was rebuilt as a library: your stories listed on the left, and the open story on the right with its cover, a row of places to go, counts of what it holds, its maps as cards and the people at its table. The profile popup is now three tabs, and the guided tour has its own button in the left bar. The relationship graph reads every part of the Codex, marks the objects players cannot see, gained a legend, a Fit button and a way in from the Codex tree, and the graph's top bar was tidied. Several map-list fixes landed: moving, renaming and deleting a map now works wherever the map lives, a copied map keeps its pins and sections, and a new story starts on the current data layout from its first day. A section made in the Codex after its objects arrived fills in at once.
Dexes also got a new look and a long pass on feel. The side bars' icons turn to liquid metal on hover, the new logo is on every page, Liquid Metal is the default theme with the old look kept as Classic, and the public pages were restyled to match. Reduced motion, reduced transparency and higher contrast settings are now honored, keyboard focus is visible everywhere, every control answers a press, and dialogs treat Enter as the focused button. The initiative sheet slides up, a map pan has momentum and its edges give, the Codex stacks on a phone, toasts stack instead of covering each other, a theme switch eases, the timeline scrubber moves the page while you drag, and the Undo toast shows its countdown and pauses under your hand. The app's text is sized relative to your browser's setting, so a larger text preference now reaches it. On the map editors, Save, Discard and Delete carry a word beside their icon, and unsaved changes read as a state rather than a pulse.
October 5, 2026
Covering September 28 to October 4
One click now shows or hides a thing from players: hold Ctrl (Cmd on a Mac) and click a Codex object, a field, a picture, a map object, a whole map, a Tome, a party, a saved roll or a timeline day. On a touch screen a Reveal key in the right bar does the same for the next tap, or stays on until you turn it off, and a list row can be swiped left to switch it. Holding the key marks everything on screen with its current state, the marks follow the map as you pan, resting the pointer on something shows its mark, and the feature has its own tutorial. Three leaks were closed on the way: a duplicate is never more visible than its original, a secret table roll is never published, and hiding a line hides its labels.
Themes arrived. Every color in the app was given a role, so a theme can replace all of them at once, and the Appearance tab of your profile lists the published themes to pick from. Admins build themes live on any page in a Theme Lab, from a palette or by hand, with a contrast table and a specimen page showing every component in every state. Elsewhere: Customize Map saves a map's first background the moment it is chosen and asks before closing with unsaved changes, context-menu submenus carry a chevron, the public pages were rebuilt around the demo world with a sitemap and one canonical address, the error pages were rebuilt with a way home that works, the map tools page groups its tools by what you are mapping, the Help page's section list folds on a phone, and the timeline bar's day colors are drawn again when it is docked.
September 28, 2026
Covering September 21 to 27
Sixteen feature tutorials were written and tested, each running on the page it teaches: Layers, Player View and secrecy, Fog of War, Customize Map, the Image Library, Ideas, Object History, the Timeline, Story Settings, the Tome, the Codex, the Game Master page, Dice and Initiative, Sharing and roles, and Import and Export. Right-click a feature's button, or press and hold it on a touch screen, and choose its tutorial; a feature's help hint and the Feature guides list reach them too. The tutorial engine learned a great deal in the process: a step re-opens the panel it points at, notices the action it asked for, keeps its ring centered and clear of edges, and tells a brand-new story which steps it cannot perform yet.
Fog of war records each day as a layer, so deleting a day closes exactly what that day opened. Player View previews the day list as well as the map. On the layer panel, the eye is now your own view and reaches nobody else, the stack can be reordered on a touch screen, and the active-layer concept was removed because it did nothing you could see. The Game Master page offers to make a sheet when you assign one and none is free, and the dice roller became three tabs: Rolling, where a roll is built by clicking dice with advantage, disadvantage and keep-highest in one click and a Show Players switch; Saved, for named rolls and tables; and History.
September 21, 2026
Covering September 14 to 20
Fog of war came to every map on a tabletop story. A map starts covered, and you paint the fog away with a brush, a box, a polygon or freehand, or re-fog an area the same way; you see through your own fog at a strength you choose, players do not. What you reveal can be recorded against a day on the timeline and carries forward, the fog is included in a PNG export the way players see it, a background swap keeps the mask in place, and the three actions that cannot be undone by pressing the same button again ask first. Pins and Fog became layer slots like any other, so you can stack things above them, the Fog button sits with the map tools in the left bar, and the Fog, Player View and Game Master buttons gained right-click menus.
In the Codex, an object's picture can now be withheld from players separately from the object, with a type-wide default, and portraits on a tabletop story start hidden until you share them; the player-view preview honors that. The visibility controls were made to read as state rather than as the action a click performs. Turning a story's timeline off now offers to flatten it first, so objects keep the values they had on the last day instead of falling back to their origins. The timeline bar is half the top bar on every page and wraps onto a second line when squeezed, the map's search field fills its half, the Game Master tabs come back as you left them, and the navigation bars fit a short window. The map editor's code was reorganized by feature behind the scenes, with no change to how it works.
September 14, 2026
Covering September 7 to 13
The initiative tracker had a week to itself. Its columns now reach a fight that is already loaded, including values linked to a Codex field, an inherited column is marked with a lock, the header gained a grip, a pin and a read-aloud button, and the tracker paints its controls for the role of whoever is looking. A turn can be undone and redone, with everything that happened in it. The tracker says who can see it, links each combatant to its Codex object, and can push the page up so nothing sits underneath it; the map's scale bar and edit drawer end at its top edge. On the Game Master page, an encounter's rows are a table with a heading over every column, and the columns can be arranged by dragging their headings, an order the tracker then reads.
A click inside a menu no longer closes it, which had made several menus feel twitchy. On the map, players see an object only during the periods you give it, and that editor moved into the six edit panels below Visibility.
September 7, 2026
Covering August 31 to September 6
The Codex detail panel can be laid out in columns: a field can span columns and rows, sections can carry dividers and row breaks, a section can be inserted between two others or moved from its own header, and a Grid view mirrors the panel's columns while you arrange it. A dropped field lands on the side of the box you dropped it on, Number and Yes/No fields render properly, and a refresh reopens the object you had open. Every disclosure in the app now points the same way: closed points right, open points down.
On the Game Master page, a party says which Codex types it draws from, you choose which types can be assigned as a sheet, and an encounter carries its own Codex sources and tracker columns, where a column can name a single cell of a table such as a saving throw. Replacing a running fight names what would be lost and offers to save it as a preset first, and adding a combatant to the tracker adds it to the encounter it came from. The tracker itself became a bottom sheet with a real table. You can also now share a story with someone who has no Dexes account yet: the invitation waits for them and lets them straight in when they sign up.
August 31, 2026
Covering August 24 to 30
A guided tour for new users: a panel that opens beside the app rather than over it, with twenty lessons in five chapters that can be taken in any order. Each step rings the control it points at, notices when you have done the thing it asked, survives a reload, and reopens as a review once finished. The Game Master page arrived the same week: players and their sheets, parties, encounter presets with conditions, dice and rollable tables, progress clocks, a Player View that says what players can see, a story window that holds players at a point in the timeline, and rolls made where the table can see them. New content on a tabletop story is hidden from players until you share it.
The Codex learned that a field can change from day to day: a value recorded on a day holds until the next recording, the panel says where a value came from and offers the way back, and players see per-day values on objects shared with them. Any type can set its own icon, any field can be deleted, Hometown and the select fields are click-to-edit, and the fields players can see carry a marker. Also this week: D&D 5e character sheets and creature stat blocks as Codex types, Ideas that reference the whole Codex and are written in Markdown, drag to reorder stories, maps and Tomes, a searchable jump list on right-clicking Maps or Tome in the right bar, an image in the Library that tells you where it is used, map objects and lines that ease between days instead of snapping, day snapshots that carry forward, the app's own color picker in place of the browser's, a Reset Zoom that returns to the previous view on a second press, and a map search that finds objects on other days.
August 24, 2026
Covering August 17 to 23
A story now has a type, and the tabletop tools appear only on a tabletop story. On one, a Codex type carries a player-facing layout beside the GM's, a field can be hidden from players with a per-type default, and a Codex object, a map object, a whole map, a Tome, a chapter or a page can be shared with named players rather than everyone. Players no longer see Ideas, Object History, Story Settings, the Library or the day list. Stories shared with you show who shared them and can be hidden from your list. Every browser alert, confirm and prompt was replaced with the app's own dialog, and Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y now undo and redo across every page that edits, with a delete's undo window surviving a navigation.
Story Settings became a modal that opens from any page, and the type and category lists are edited where they are used, in the Codex. Inline help hints appeared across the signed-in pages, and the Help page now documents every one of them. The map's scale bar has its own right-click menu, can be hidden, and jumps to its unit setting; extending a movement path appends stops instead of overwriting them; Move Pin shows a ring and a spot you can change your mind about; a trackpad's two-finger scroll pans instead of zooming; a warning appears when a Codex object is already placed on the day you are viewing; and the Scrubber's day pill no longer opens off the top of the screen. Every object type shares one color palette, the Library is on every page, and the Codex's object count says what it is made of.
August 17, 2026
Covering August 10 to 16
Collaboration arrived. A story can be shared by email with a role, co-GM, player or observer, and shows up under Shared with me for the person invited; images added to a shared story land in the owner's storage so nothing breaks when a member leaves; a story can be handed to another account, who has to accept it; and a player can reach their own character sheet. With that came the first secrecy boundaries: GM Notes, secret Codex objects, per-object and per-layer secrecy on the map with a Player View to check it, GM-only Tomes, whole-map secrecy, new map objects hidden by default with select-and-bulk-act, and a per-day switch for whether players see a day. The first tabletop tools landed too: a clock field type, a live initiative tracker, and a Run button on encounters.
A security pass hardened the server side, closing a script-injection gap in the Codex tree, escaping user text at every injection point, bounding import archives, and pinning the libraries loaded from CDNs. The hand-drawn icons across the app were replaced with FontAwesome, select popups are dark everywhere, the profile popup was redesigned in the app's panel language, the Tome editor renders its live preview past the first screen and shows raw source only while you are editing, a demo world can be kept as a real story, movement path lines follow their owner's visibility window, the text box's three style menus became one, and a stale cache setting that drew black map icons in Chrome was fixed.
August 10, 2026
Covering August 3 to 9
A pass for iPad and WebKit: long-press paths for six menus, a touch fallback for drag and drop so nesting Codex objects and reordering Tome chapters work on a tablet, a Finish button for click-to-place shapes, a guard on the PNG export canvas, and the two-tap problem fixed by swallowing only the tap that belonged to a long press. The public pages share one theme and script, the Help page's section links open the section they point at, and a visitor who is already signed in is offered a route into the app from every public page. The sign-in page was redesigned and reintegrated with the live flow.
Behind the scenes, Dexes gained daily encrypted backups of its database and uploads with a verified restore, a maintenance mode with notice, read-only and closed levels that freezes writes at the database, and a check that notices when the deployed security rules drift from the repository.
August 3, 2026
Covering July 27 to August 2
Dexes went live at its real address, and a public landing page took the root while the signed-in story list moved to its own page. In the map editor, every edit panel is docked in a drawer at the left edge that shrinks the map rather than floating over it, the Style panel and the Layer and Customize Map panels included; switching editors with unsaved changes asks whether to save, discard or stay; panel sections collapse and remember it; a Codex-linked pin shows a hover card; text boxes are written in a live-preview Markdown editor; every layer's stacking position is adjustable and the PNG export respects it; a line can have an outline and a shadow; the map's borders can be dragged in as far as the screen center; and the editor warns when an opacity is set very low or a replacement background has different dimensions.
The Codex tree gained a nested view: drag an object onto another to nest it, with held items, members and a nation's locations shown as children, and a right-click menu with select mode, duplicate and duplicate-to-world on every row. Built-in types have a field editor, a location can link to a map that opens from its pin, a nation picker sits on locations, and the avatar opens full size in a lightbox. The Tome editor inserts Library images with drag-to-resize, edits tables in place with column widths, and takes Ctrl+B, I and E. The search page became Object History with graph and favorite buttons, the Timeline page split into Days and Calendar tabs, tree panels drag to resize, and the profile popup was redesigned. Shadows on labels and lines now render on an iPad, and the editors no longer fail to parse on older iPadOS.
July 27, 2026
Covering July 20 to 26
The relationship graph was rebuilt: a Focus mode centers one object with its neighborhood at one or two hops, a Whole World mode lays out everything, edges hide outside their dates as you move the timeline, a search refocuses, and each world remembers its view. Every Codex tree row has a graph button that opens the graph on that object, and a pin's View menu reaches it too. The Codex avatar gained icon buttons and a frame shape picker. In the Tome, tables render as real grids in the live preview, a Codex link shows a hover card and a right-click menu to view it in the Codex or a new tab, and a new page is selected as soon as it is made. Items can be transferred between holders, and every small picture across the app is served as a thumbnail.
New users are offered a demo world to explore, an in-app feedback form sends bug reports and feature requests straight to the developer, a map-tool recommendations page was added, the sign-in pages were rebranded, and mobile landscape no longer shows white edges. On the map, a label's newlines render as stacked lines, the label shadow has an intensity slider, a story-object pin's panel leads with the object and mirrors its name and description, objects are hidden during a delete's undo countdown, and the style bar docked to the bottom edge for the moment.
July 20, 2026
Covering July 13 to 19
Six quality-of-life features in one go: an Undo toast on every delete, Find on Map from a Codex object, a Help page, Export Map as PNG, a first relationship graph, and creating a range of timeline days at once. The map's top bar gained a search box, Edit Image split into Adjust Image with handles and Edit Details with a panel, style defaults got their own tab in Customize Map, and a linked pin's menu offers View in Codex or Timeline. Stories and maps can be favorited, maps carry categories with a filter, the stories and maps lists were combined into one page with story settings beside them, and the History page was redesigned to match the Codex.
The Tome arrived: a Markdown writing feature for books and short stories, organized into chapters and pages, with an editor that renders as you type in the Obsidian style and links to Codex objects. Codex detail panels became customizable layouts. The timeline gained a Milestone mode, with a per-map local override. A story export now includes its uploaded images, and an import can overwrite or add to what is there. The Image Library's viewer takes arrow keys and swipes, the picker remembers its tab and filter and offers the stock images, labels and pins can have a text shadow, each day has a visible-on-map switch, labels are clickable in Firefox, and the Codex reopens the object you last had open.
July 13, 2026
Covering July 6 to 12
The Codex as it exists today was built this week. The objects page was redesigned around a full-height tree with an inline detail panel, where everything is edited in place: a search chip, section editors, favorites for sections and objects, color swatches for every type, and objects created straight from the tree. It was then renamed the Codex and given custom types: a type creator with templates, a field editor, fields recorded per day, date-range relationships, and integration with the map, History and the timeline viewer. Biomes became the sixth built-in type, and the map's data was consolidated under one record per map.
The corner buttons gave way to full-height side bars on every page, with a top bar carrying the title and the timeline. The Timeline page gained a tree view with click-to-edit names and dates, maps nest one level under a parent, the tile grids became compact rows, line crossings were reworked so one line passes cleanly over another, the Gregorian calendar picker shows day-of-week headers, the line style bar opens on right-click, pins have their own style bar, and every map panel was simplified to a single Details tab.
July 6, 2026
Covering June 29 to July 5
No changes shipped this week.
June 29, 2026
Covering June 22 to 28
The app moved to its gold-on-dark theme, with the navigation icons unified and the timeline's warning states restyled, and the Style Bar arrived: a floating panel for text box and label styling with explicit Save and Discard, tooltips and icons, replacing the old style tabs. On the map, the Change Layer menu reaches images, text boxes, lines and labels; the label menu merged into the unified context menu, which now detects every object under the pointer; a Measure Distance tool was added; arc labels render as a full circle so long text overflows instead of clipping and can run the other way; and a mirrored image no longer drags backwards. The timeline bar is colored by its state instead of showing a banner, BC and AD dates are labeled, and a persistent toast appears if the connection drops.
June 22, 2026
Covering June 15 to 21
The Image Library opened, with My Images and Stock Images tabs, an image viewer and a storage readout, and one shared picker now serves every place an image is set. Map labels gained path editing, fonts and weights, and a location pin makes its own label; image objects can be placed on a map and moved, scaled, rotated and mirrored, with edits held until Save; text boxes have header, body and box styling; and lines arrived, with crossings, live preview, label offset and flip, and vertex deletion. One Escape key closes whatever is open, the arrow keys step through the timeline, and the calendar's month and year are clickable for quick navigation.
Context menus gained icons and section headers across every page, new entity pins get a default icon, touch drawing no longer pans the map, page titles carry the story and map name, clicking an empty calendar day offers to create it, leap years are right, there is no year zero, a button hides and shows the map's chrome, and the profile popup gained Delete Profile and the legal links.
June 15, 2026
Covering June 8 to 14
The hex map was replaced by the image map editor: bring a map as a picture, and place pins and draw regions on it at positions stored as fractions of the image, with pan and pinch zoom, long-press menus, a Locations layer, timeline-aware visibility, and Plot Movement, which draws a pin's path across days with draggable stops. A location can link to a map, opened from its pin. Nations became a section of the objects page, with locations belonging to nations, and a story can run with no timeline at all. The pin icon set grew to about ninety, context menus stay inside the window, History gained Location and Nation tabs with an event for every snapshot day, and map labels shipped in full: SVG text on a drawn path or an arc, with their own layer.
June 8, 2026
Covering June 1 to 7
The hex map's context menu was reorganized into sections, with Copy Icon and Copy Details and a delete for one day or every day, and a floating scale bar was added with its settings in Customize Map and remembered with the zoom. Timeline days sort themselves by date when created or deleted, a duplicate date is warned about, and World Settings became Story Settings.
June 1, 2026
Covering May 25 to 31
The timeline bar was integrated into the pages, with a range extension, docking that moves the panels out of its way, and hex map tiles that follow the selected day. Items can be handled and uploads deleted, chips show group membership, a settings page lets you edit a story's character types and item categories, the timeline understands the Gregorian calendar, the history viewer draws a tile's icon instead of listing its fields, and every page has a favicon.
May 25, 2026
Covering May 18 to 24
Dexes returns from a hiatus. The original version was started on June 1, 2020 and set aside on January 20, 2021; this week it was begun again from a fresh base. The first build of the new Dexes: a live database behind every page, a hex map with zoom, reset and click-to-drag, square or hex tiles, right-click to move an object and a Copy Tile option, group chips, the first timeline pages and bars with snapshots of an object's state on a day, delete notifications, and the start of the demo data.