News & Status

New button on the Cutting Assistant stage, just above the index-ring toggle: Loupe View. It opens a small panel with a switch and a speed slider.

Turn it on and facets stop popping into place. The stone rotates to face you, then the facet cuts in, fast at first, slowing as it nears the meet, the way it goes on a real lap. Blue marks where the stone contacts the lap edge; the cut turns yellow as it finishes.

Use Next Facet for one cut, or Auto Cut to watch the whole stone come out of the rough. Pause stops mid-facet and play picks up at that depth. The slider starts at half speed, about three seconds a facet.

Switch on Measure in the Rough Planner's render controls and move the pointer over the stone. The readout gives you the height above the base of the rough in millimetres, base at zero — no calipers, no guessing where the girdle is going to land.

A yellow ring marks the height you're reading. A blue ring shows how wide the finished gem is there, tilting with the stone so a rotated plan keeps its ring in the gem's own plane. Between them you can see where your stone sits inside the rough, and whether that inclusion at 4 mm ends up in the gem or in the dust.

Works on any rough — traced hull, boule, half boule, preform — and needs no fit first. In multi-stone layouts the blue ring follows whichever gem the height passes through.

Also: the Clearances margins are now labelled in plain millimetres and both default to 2 mm.

The Cutting Assistant draws a gear plate around the stone — the index ring — so you can see at a glance where you are on the wheel.

• Keeps track of what you're cutting. The index for the current step is lit in red, with a dashed leader running to the facet it belongs to, and the facet carries its own number. No counting ticks, no losing your place halfway through a tier.
• Shows the stone's orientation, not just its shape. The ring sits in the stone's own plane, so it tilts and spins with the gem as you orbit. Where the index sits relative to the stone stays obvious from any angle.
• Faster when you're drawing a new diagram. Watching the indexes come up on the ring as you work means you can lay out a cut and check it reads right without stopping to work out which tick is which.

Toggle it from the button on the right-edge HUD. It works at every gear size — 64, 80, 96 and 120.

• Pick Opal from the Material list, switch to Realistic, and you get the real thing: a milky white stone with patches of green, blue, gold and violet flashing inside it.
• Turn the stone and the colors change — patches shift hue, wink out, and light up somewhere else. That's play of color, the effect opal is actually known for, and it works the same way in the Gem Showcase.
• Part of every stone is left as potch, the dull common opal that doesn't flash. A stone that lit up everywhere at once wouldn't look like an opal.
• The Color picker grays out for Opal, the way it already did for Alexandrite — the material supplies its own color, so there's nothing to set.
• Opal's specific gravity is corrected to 2.15, so carat weights in the stone report are now right for it.
• New docs page: Opal's Play of Color, covering what you're seeing and what it means if you're planning to cut one.

• The Material card has a new Opacity row under Color depth. Color depth answers "how saturated for this size"; opacity answers the one next to it: how much you can see through the stone at all.
• It runs the way the words read — fully opaque on the left, fully see-through on the right. All the way right is how every stone has always rendered, so nothing you've already designed looks any different.
• Drag left and the body starts taking light out of the beam and glowing with it instead: translucent through the middle of the range, like jade or moonstone, and a lit solid at the end, with no view of the far facets at all.
• Works on every material, in the Developer and in the Gem Showcase, and it saves with the design.
• Realistic render only — Solid mode shows a flat gray stone and models no light through the body.

• The Rough Planner has a real phone layout now: one bottom dock holds everything, with tabs for Stone, Rough, Fit and Result.
• A yield readout stays on screen at all times — yield percent, carats recovered and how many stones fit — so the number you came for is never hidden behind a panel. Tap it to open the full result.
• Tap a tab to raise its panel, tap it again (or pull the handle down) to drop it back and get the whole screen for the stone.
• The stone keeps three controls on screen: the actions menu, the view switcher, and Save PNG / Record stacked in the top right corner.
• The planner opens on Stone when you arrive with nothing loaded, and on Result when you send a design over from the designer.
• On iPad the same dock floats as a centred card and lays its panels out in two columns, so the stone keeps most of the screen.
• Fixes a bug where the Plan panel could not be opened at all on a phone — its button was stacked underneath the Result button.

• A new Cut mode selector sits between Proportions and Facets: switch any design between Regular and Portrait.
• A portrait cut is a shallow window stone with two crowns and no pavilion — the classic flat, glass-clear look historically cut to sit over a miniature portrait.
• In Portrait mode you edit a single crown and it is mirrored across the girdle onto the bottom, so the stone has two tables. The Facets panel shows just the Girdle and Crown sections; the mirrored half updates as you cut.
• Your authored girdle thickness is preserved, and the weight and dimensions account for the full two-crown stone.
• The PDF report prints the one crown you file plus a transfer note — cut the crown, transfer the stone, and re-cut the mirror on the same indices.
• The mode is saved with the design, so reopening a .facet file brings it back exactly as you left it.

• General bug fixes of developer

• In the Cutting Assistant tier list, every index is now clickable — click one and the stone shows all cuts up to and including that index.
• Clicking anywhere else on a tier row still jumps to the end of that tier.

• Enable TOTP-based two-factor authentication from Dashboard > Security > Authenticator app (2FA).
• Scan a QR code (or enter the base32 secret manually) on any authenticator app, then confirm the 6-digit code to enable.
• When enabled, sign-in asks for your authenticator code instead of your email code. If you lose your device, use the "Lost your device?" fallback link to sign in with email.

• The yearly price is $240 — $20 a month, billed once, $108 less than paying monthly. Monthly stays at $29. If you're already on the old $249 annual price, you keep it until your renewal, then it drops.
• The Free Demo replaces the old Free plan. Every tool is now open to look through — Gem Designer, Cutting Assistant, Rough Planner, the lot — and the full 22-material library comes with it. Load your own .gem, .asc or .gcs file and it renders.
• The catch is the same one it always was, just stated honestly: the demo is view only. Saving, editing and exporting are Pro. The old "three materials" limit is gone entirely.
• Pricing pages now list what Pro actually includes, with an expander that spells out all of it rather than the seventeen-line summary that was there before.

• Every designer page now has a small bug button in the bottom-right corner — the editor, Cutting Assistant, Guided Design, Rough Planner and Showcase, and it even follows you into Ray Studio.
• Click it, describe what went wrong, hit Submit. The report reaches support directly, already tagged with the page you were on — no email client, no forms, no leaving your work.
• You don't need to be logged in, though if you are we can follow up on your report directly.

• The Rough Planner's Multi-stone mode now supports irregular (photo-traced) rough — load several diagrams and the planner packs them all into the one traced stone, sized as large as the hull and their neighbours allow.
• Saw kerf is respected between packed stones in both Auto and Best Yield modes, and the results card shows when a stone's size was limited by an adjacent stone rather than the rough wall.
• Equal volume (matched set) works on irregular rough too.
• A progress spinner now appears during any heavy fit computation, so the page never looks frozen while optimizing.

• The "+ New" dialog is now a native-feeling bottom sheet on phones: it slides up from the bottom with a step progress bar, larger touch-friendly controls, and a full-width Next button that stays in reach of your thumb.
• The index wheel is now picked on a graphic of a real faceting index gear — tap a number on the half-wheel to select it (on all screen sizes), and mirror symmetry uses a proper toggle switch.
• Guided Mode's shape cards are laid out in a two-column grid sized for phone screens.
• Desktop and tablet are unchanged.

• Fixed dashboard timestamps (last sign-in, activity, preview-link expiry) showing several hours ahead — all times now display correctly in your timezone.
• The design name in the editor toolbar now has a visible border so it's clear it can be edited by clicking it.
• The crown and pavilion diagrams in the editor's Inspect panel now scale to fit elongated stones — a pear's tip is no longer cut off at the edge.
• Rough Planner's Auto placement now seats elongated stones (pear, oval) on their true axes, so the finished gem always fits inside the rough instead of poking through a wall.

• Fixed opening .facet, .gcs, .gem, and .asc files on iPhone and iPad.
• Fixed a desktop scrollbar glitch in the guided tour and an overlay issue on the subscribe screen.
• Login code (OTP) resend is more reliable.

• Import a diagram from a plain screenshot: Gem Diagram now measures the drawing and rebuilds the design with real dimensions.
• Scanned (image-only) PDF diagrams now import too — we run text recognition automatically when a PDF has no selectable text.

• New Deconstruct page: break an existing diagram down into its cutting sequence.
• Added revert and draft-restore so you can undo changes to a saved design or recover unsaved work.
• Assorted copy and UI fixes across the app.

• Redesigned the app header and navigation for phones and small screens.
• PDF diagram solving now runs on our servers — faster and more reliable, especially on lower-powered devices.
• General site cleanup and search improvements.

Gem Diagram is officially open. Design faceting diagrams in the browser, plan rough, import GemCad and PDF diagrams, and export cut sheets. Free, Starter, Pro, and annual plans are available — see the pricing page for details.

This page is where we'll post launch updates, new features, and any service status changes. Check back for what's new.