Preview and history
See a frame on its own, as the screen or page it will be, and look back through everything a file has been.
Preview
Preview shows one frame filling the window, without the board, the panels or the other frames round it. To open it:
- At the top right, click Preview, the ▶ button beside Share. It opens the frame you have selected, or the one your selection is in, or else the page's first frame.
- Or click the small ▶ at the end of a selected frame's name, drawn above it on the board.
The bar across the top shows the frame's name and who else is in the file. Click Close preview in the bar (or press Esc) to go back to the board.
The preview is live: changes made in the file, by you in another tab, a teammate or an agent, show as they happen. Anyone who can open the file can preview it, and a preview changes nothing.
Scaling
The Scaling button in the bar sets how the frame meets your screen:
- Actual size (100%): as drawn.
- Responsive: laid out again at your window's width, at 100%, as a web page would be. Frames built with layout reflow.
- Fit width: made smaller when it is wider than the window. A long page scrolls down; a phone screen stays as drawn. This is where every preview starts.
- Fit width and height: the whole frame in view.
Hide UI, at the foot of the same menu, hides the bar for a clean screen, for a demo or a screenshot. There is no button to bring it back, as the bar is gone: press ⌘\, or Esc to leave the preview. Pressing Z switches between 100% and the whole frame in view.
Going through the frames
With more than one frame on the page, arrows at the foot of the screen say where you are, like 2 / 5. Click the arrows, Previous frame and Next frame, (or press ← and →) to step through them in the order you read them on the board: row by row, left to right. Lay frames out in the order of the flow and they play in that order. The scaling you chose holds as you go.
Version history
Open the file menu (the Kite mark at the top left) and choose Version history. The right panel lists the file's versions, newest first, each with when it was made, by whom, and how many layers the file had. Click Done at the top of the list to go back to the design panel.
- Autosave versions are made for you about every ten minutes while the file changes, whoever is changing it, agents included. Kite keeps all of them for two days, then one an hour for a week, then one a day for a month.
- Versions you name are kept for good.
Save a version
Click Save a version at the top of the list, type a name in Name this version, then click away from the field (or press Enter). Name one before a big change, or before you hand the file to an agent, so you can find the moment again.
Restore
Hover a version in the list and click Restore. Kite asks first: The file goes back to how it was then, for everyone. The current state is saved as a version first.
Everyone with the file open sees it change at once. Nothing is lost: if you restored the wrong one, restore the version saved just before, at the top of the list. Version history is for people who can edit the file, as an old version can hold what has since been taken out of it.
The file's thumbnail
Every file has a picture: on its card in your library, in Kite's emails about it, and in the preview a link shows when you paste it into a chat. By default it is the first frame of the file's first page.
To choose another, right-click a frame on the board, not one inside another frame, and choose Set as thumbnail. On that frame, the same place then says Remove as thumbnail, which goes back to the first frame. If the chosen frame is hidden, deleted or moved into another frame, the first frame stands in. The picture is drawn again as the file changes, at most about every half hour, so a fresh edit can take a little while to show.
What's new
Open the file menu (the Kite mark at the top left) and choose What's new, at its foot. It lists the latest changes to the editor, newest first, each in a line.