True redaction removes the text and images from the file — not a black box on top. Plus real in-place text editing, fill + sign, reorder pages, and OCR.
LaunchEdit text in place, sign, redact, fill forms, and reorganize PDF files in your browser — all on your device. No upload, no subscription.
Drop two versions of a contract or drawing set. Moved notes read as moves, changed values light up digit by digit, and hidden text is named.
LaunchSide-by-side or overlay PDF diff driven by one engine that reads each file into a structured model — text, vector geometry, images, form fields, annotations — and compares the models. Moves show as moves, edits show only where they happened, and any PDF type works without picking a mode.
Drop a Gerber ZIP, an ODB++ .tgz or an IPC-2581 .xml and inspect every layer — compare revisions, snap-to-pad measure, run DRC and preview the board in 3D.
LaunchOpen Gerber, Excellon, ODB++ and IPC-2581 PCB files. Inspect layers, measure traces, run DRC, export to PNG / SVG / DXF.
Open a .step / .stp part and it measures itself: volume, thinnest wall, draft and undercuts on load, and a hole list with a BOM in one click. Measure, section, export STL.
LaunchOpen a STEP / STP part and it measures itself — volume, thinnest wall, draft and undercut checks on load, plus hole detection with a BOM. Measure, section, export STL. Rust + WASM B-rep kernel, runs in your browser.
Compress, merge, split, convert, and manipulate PDF files.
Resize, compress, convert, and transform images.
Convert, compress, and cut audio and video — MP3, WAV, MP4, WebM, Opus — all in your browser, nothing uploads.
Simulate a canning process down to its F0 sterilizing value.
Encrypt files, share encrypted notes as links, and read passport IDs and Windows event logs.
Analyze packet captures, move files between devices, and console into network gear — nothing uploads.
Scan receipts into an expense ledger — your receipts and spending stay on your device.
View, measure, and repair CAD and 3D files — STEP, STL, OBJ, PLY, GLB, 3MF, DXF, and Gerber — right in your browser. Nothing uploads.
All 43 entries, newest first. Click an entry to read it, or go back to the full changelog for the other areas.
Installing Loft as an app used to mean digging through browser menus — the site's Install button only lived on the homepage and could never offer the native one-tap dialog. Fixed end to end.
Under the hood the install flow, the service worker, and the manifest were consolidated to a single source of truth, so the installed app always gets the same shortcuts, file handlers, and share targets the site advertises.
Every tool now carries its own change history, derived automatically from the build's git log. See exactly how a tool has evolved — when it was last improved, how often, and what changed.
/history route per tool lists every change grouped by date, each tagged with its type (feature, fix, performance, refactor…) and scopeNo hand-written entries to maintain — the history is the commit log, surfaced where it's useful.
Loft Tools now has a proper place to explain how browser-local tools actually work — and why your files never leave your device. A new blog and a rebuilt explainer page launched together.
The whole pitch is that PDFs, images, audio, and CAD files are processed in your browser tab — no server, no upload, no account. These pages show the receipts: what runs locally, what that costs in memory, and where the limits are. Every post is structured so search engines and AI assistants can cite it accurately.
The About page previously spent three paragraphs bashing competing tool sites — "barely disguised ad farms", "actively hostile minefields", "greedy paid tools". That hostile tone undermines the privacy-first brand and reads as bitter rather than principled. The new version leads with privacy and cross-platform reach (PWA, every modern browser, offline-ready after first visit, no install), then explains who built it and how it stays free. The solo-dev voice and the tool-request CTA stay.
A separate copy sweep pruned vague marketing phrases on the homepage and /featured meta — "powerful" replaced with the specific format families being addressed ("PDF, PCB, and 3D software"), "Zero friction" on the About subtitle replaced with the concrete "No accounts, no upload, no tracking." (An attempt to also rewrite the homepage hero h1 and subtitle in the same sweep was reverted later the same day.)
Every tool now ships a 40-60 word answerCapsule — the definitional paragraph rendered between the H1 and the HowTo block, and reused as the WebApplication.description in JSON-LD. Research on AI-generated answers shows ~44% of ChatGPT citations come from the first 30% of a page, so this is the highest-leverage AEO surface a tool page has.
scripts/inject-answer-capsule.mjs helper inserts the YAML folded scalar after the existing h1: line; supports --overwrite to replace.The right-rail tip card on featured tool pages was wired to "Open Compare PDF →" linking to the Compare PDF page — the page the reader was already on, making the button a no-op reload. The CTA now reads "More tools like this" and routes to the sibling category page (e.g. /tools/pdf-tools/) so the click surfaces adjacent tools instead. Falls back to /tools when the category is unknown.
Tool pages now show a right-side rail card at desktop widths (≥1280 px), pinned at the same position on every page. It rotates between tool-specific tips harvested from each tool's YAML, cross-promo for the featured tools, the latest changelog entry, and a community-support card.
F7 to walk every diff, snap-to-pad measurement, snapshot URLs. Small tools ship one or two. Tips also render into each tool's .md AI variant under ## Tips.right: 16 px on every tool page. Wide monitors (≥2064 px) keep the content perfectly centered; narrower laptops (1280–2063 px) push the content slightly left to make room — same rail position either way.is-pro to <html> and one CSS rule will hide the rail across the site with zero refactor.This is the placeholder era — content rotates from a hand-curated pool deterministically per tool per build date. When the in-house ad system lands, real creatives will slot into the same position via the same component without changing the user-facing pattern.
Every tool page now shows a short 40–60-word "answer paragraph" between the headline and the how-to steps. It's the first thing readers — and AI assistants citing the page — see.
WebApplication.description JSON-LD field, so the differentiator surfaces both to humans on the page and to crawlers reading the schema.Research on AI citations suggests roughly 44% of ChatGPT citations come from the first 30% of a page, so this paragraph is the highest-leverage block on the tool template.
Every Loft Tools tool (60 of them) now ships hand-written tips — short, normie-friendly notes about non-obvious behaviour and the privacy mechanism that makes each tool different from upload-based competitors.
HowToTip inside the page's existing HowTo schema, so the SERP rich-result card can surface them alongside the step list — without any new structured-data block to maintain.tips schema check so future YAML edits can't ship malformed tips..pages.dev previews are now noindex, nofollow via a Pages middleware. Stops Googlebot indexing the per-deploy preview URLs as duplicates of lofttools.com.Three pieces of homepage copy were leaking outdated category names and tool counts to search engines after the late-April catalog cull and the 3D / CAD viewer launch.
What changed:
media, text) that had been renamed or retired.All three are now accurate and current. Search snippets and AI-scanner crawls will surface the right thing.
Loft Tools now runs its own first-party analytics, replacing the third-party RUM beacon that was sampled, broken when the upstream had outages, and silently dropping events on offline / service-worker-cached pageviews.
What's new for visitors:
The full beacon polish round added rate limiting, a daily-aggregate cron so dashboards stay fresh without a full table scan, and a conversion-goals layer that tracks tool completions, PWA installs, shares, and saves so we know which tools actually help versus which need work.
Installing Loft Tools as a PWA now unlocks the full set of OS-level integrations that modern installable apps offer. The web app manifest was rebuilt against industry standards and a handful of new browser APIs were wired in.
What you can now do as an installed user:
web+lofttools:// URLs open the installed app on click.A polish pass shortly after added a status indicator in the navbar showing PWA mode and wired the new helpers into the compare-pdf and shared-template tools so everyone benefits.
The server-side automation surface was scrubbed entirely. It was unused by external clients and added attack surface with no upside. Going forward, the only programmatic agent surface is the in-page window.loft.tools shim that lets a browser-running agent operate the same tools a human would — no server keys, no rate limits, no separate auth path.
Loft Tools is now dark by default unless you explicitly toggle to light, and clones of the site get a visible warning banner instead of a free copy of our service worker, analytics, and PWA install prompts.
Why this matters:
Google search results were showing a generic teal-square placeholder instead of our brand mark. Two visible-brand bugs landed in the same fix:
/favicon.ico was returning 404, and our icon entries were locked behind dark/light media queries that Googlebot doesn't match. The result snippet picked up our cyan brand mark instead of a generic fallback.A few follow-up rounds polished the favicon further: a proper multi-resolution .ico, a canonical dark-frame version from the brand kit, and a fix for a dark-corner bleed in the on-dark logo asset.
Loft Tools no longer loads fonts from Google Fonts. All three fonts (Inter, JetBrains Mono, and Space Grotesk) now serve from the same origin as the site itself.
Why this matters:
fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com are no longer trusted origins.The transition took two attempts — the first approach was incompatible with the Tailwind build pipeline, leaving the site briefly falling back to system sans-serif before the proper fix landed via Astro's built-in Fonts API.
Loft now explicitly tells AI crawlers they're welcome via Cloudflare's Content Signals declaration in robots.txt. The default rule now declares:
This matches the long-standing project stance that AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and others) are intentionally allowed because being citable by AI engines benefits a privacy-first tool catalog.
Additionally, /.well-known/traffic-advice was added with Chrome's Private Prefetch Proxy advice. According to Google's data, prefetched navigations can be 20-30% faster on LCP — and Chrome only uses prefetch when sites opt in via this endpoint.
Every tool now exposes a rich, AI-friendly privacy section at /tools/{category}/{slug}.md. Crawlers and AI engines like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity prefer this markdown view, and they want specific answers — not vague reassurance.
The new privacy block explicitly addresses:
Each tool's markdown view also includes a closing comparison against upload-based competitors so that AI engines answering questions like "what's the safest PDF tool" have the structural difference clearly stated. The on-page experience is unchanged — this is for the crawlers and assistants summarizing tools elsewhere.
The footer now shows just three legal links — Privacy, Terms, and All policies — instead of the previous seven.
The /legal hub still lists everything (cookies policy, license, notices, accessibility, DMCA, and so on) and is one click away. Industry norm for indie SaaS is two to three legal links; more than that starts to read as legal-anxiety and crowds out secondary product links.
Loft uses no cookies (analytics are cookieless) so the cookies-link prominence isn't required.
Loft Tools now has a blog at /blog with a careful focus on quality over quantity. Posts use a structured citation system so claims can be traced to sources.
Each post supports:
CreativeWork and shows in a References block at the bottom of the post.First posts in draft are deep dives on PDF comparison approaches and how they relate to the rest of the industry. The blog is positioned as a reference resource, not a marketing surface.
New pages and changes now reach Bing, Yandex, and Naver within minutes instead of waiting 1-3 days for a sitemap recrawl. Loft Tools now uses the open IndexNow protocol that these search engines support.
Coverage notes:
The first ping pushed 122 URLs and was accepted. Subsequent deploys only push the delta against the last run.
Search engine crawlers will now see consistent URLs across the entire site. Three connected bugs were making Bing Webmaster Tools flag every URL with "URL has redirect" warnings.
What was fixed:
These changes don't affect anything you'd notice as a user, but they meaningfully improve how often search engines correctly surface the right pages.
Brand search results will now correctly identify Loft Tools as a web-based PWA, not the unrelated Blender 3D modeling add-on of the same name.
Schema improvements:
lofttools, loft.tools, and lofttools.com so any spelling variant resolves to the same entity.Same Loft, same tools — search engines and AI assistants will just have a much easier time telling us apart from the Blender plugin in their knowledge graphs.
The site now serves stricter security headers across every asset. This work hardens cross-origin policies so that browser-side workers (the WASM engines that power video, PDF, and OCR tools) can't be silently blocked or hijacked.
What changed:
These are mostly defense-in-depth changes — the kind of thing that prevents specific bugs you'd never see directly but that matter for everyone.
Two simultaneous changes: the tool catalog got a focused cut, and a long-standing SEO drag on every URL was fixed.
/tools/text-tools/* URL now redirects to the homepage./tools/video-tools/<slug>/ now; the old /tools/media-tools/<slug>/ URLs 301 to the new ones automatically.Net: 15 tools culled, total catalog down to 59 surviving tools — all of which are either file-aware (PDF, image, video, CAD) or formula-precise (cooking math, security).
Every URL on the site is served at /foo/bar/ (Astro's canonical form), but for months the sitemap and canonical tags were emitting the bare /foo/bar form. Bing Webmaster Tools was reporting "URL has redirect" on every single sitemap entry — a quiet crawl-budget bleed that affected ranking. Fixed across the sitemap generator, every canonical <link> tag, and the 24+ rules in _redirects so the bare form 301s straight to the slashed form instead of chaining through two hops.
The Content-Security-Policy was tightened in May to drop unsafe-eval, on the assumption that FFmpeg-wasm used only WebAssembly.instantiate. That turned out to be wrong — FFmpeg's Emscripten glue uses dynamic Function() for codec dispatch on some audio/video paths, and the tighter CSP was throwing a runtime violation the moment you dropped a video. CSP restored to allow unsafe-eval (alongside the existing unsafe-inline, so no meaningful security regression). The three video tools convert again.
Force-refresh the site (Ctrl+Shift+R) if you previously saw the "Compiling or instantiating WebAssembly module violates [...] CSP" error — the PWA service worker caches the old headers.
The legal, contact, and install paths all got production polish before launch day.
Legal & contact:
/contact page organizes everything by intent: 3 quick forms (bug, request, feedback), 2 direct email channels (sponsor, license), and 6 legal channels. Each card shows both the email and a link to the relevant policy./.well-known/security.txt per RFC 9116 so security researchers know where to report issues.Bug Report tool — searchable tool picker. The "Which tool?" field on /bug-report had been a native 74-option <select> which was nearly unusable. It's now a typeahead combobox: type to filter, arrow keys to navigate, Enter to pick. "Other / not listed" pinned at the bottom.
PWA Install Guide — full rewrite. The install button is now always visible, not gated by browser sniffing. The guide accordion covers 13 browser × OS combinations (Chrome, Edge, Safari, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, Samsung Internet, Firefox, Arc/Dia) with literal click-paths cited from each vendor's docs. Honest about which combinations don't support real installation, and offers a one-click fast-path when the browser actually supports it.
Small fix: 6 placeholder strings across the feedback forms were rendering literal "…" text instead of an ellipsis character.
The sponsor system went through a full audit pass before we accepted live payments. It now handles delayed bank-transfer payment methods (ACH, SEPA, Boleto), survives duplicate webhook deliveries from Stripe, and never demotes an admin-approved name back to pending on a retry.
User-visible additions:
/sponsor/all page — a permanent gratitude archive grouped by year for sponsors who fall outside the active wall. Policy: monthly active sponsors are always shown, monthly cancellations get a 30-day grace period, one-time gifts stay on the wall for 90 days, then move to the archive forever.Behind the scenes: rate limiting on the checkout endpoint stops anyone from burning Stripe's quota with junk requests, and display-name moderation now normalizes Unicode tricks (zero-width characters, combining marks, lookalike letters) before filtering.
We ran a deep audit of the site on iPhone and Android and shipped a stack of fixes for issues that desktop testing had been hiding.
<div> styled as a button, is now a real <button> so screen readers announce it correctly.We stripped ~17 arrow-decorated "Link →" call-to-action buttons that had crept into nearly every section. When every link has the same arrow, the arrow stops meaning anything. Arrows now only appear on the four CTAs that genuinely escape the current section to a broader context: the homepage "What's new" banner, the mega-menu "All categories" link, the footer's latest-changelog link, and the icon-only currency submit button.
Pages that benefit most: /support (was 3 identical arrows in a row), the homepage, the tools index, the docs landing, feature requests, and the explore mega-menu (which had 16 per-category arrows alone).
The shared editor header used by PDF Editor, Compare PDF, and Gerber Viewer got a navigation refresh. The Loft mark in the corner is now a pure home link — click it and you go home, nothing else. The first breadcrumb segment ("Loft") now opens the same Explore menu you see on regular pages, but anchored under the trigger as a left-slide drawer so the cursor doesn't have to cross the screen. On mobile, a hamburger button replaces the hover trigger and opens the same drawer with a touch-friendly scrim.
A small detail: navigating between regular pages and editor pages now smoothly morphs the "Explore" button text into "Loft" and back, so the menu trigger feels like the same element across layouts.
Tool workspaces now have a proper glass-card surface again — translucent background, backdrop blur, cyan rim, and a soft shadow ladder. The previous flat fill made cards disappear into the page. Light mode gets a matching white-glass surface with slate hairline borders. The card is now driven from a single set of theme tokens so palette tweaks propagate without per-component edits.
The word "Upload" was removed from user-facing strings across 32+ tools. Files never leave your device — calling step 1 "Upload PDF" was actively misleading. The trust pill now reads "Local compute" instead of just "Local" so it's clear what stays local (the compute itself, not a file pointer). Button labels like "Upload PNG / SVG / JPG" became "Choose PNG / SVG / JPG", and YAML step names switched from "Upload" verbs to "Select", "Open", or "Pick" depending on context. Internal state strings and explicit no-upload claims ("Your file is never uploaded") were intentionally preserved.
The visual brand pivoted from violet-primary to cyan-primary with a new wordmark and a working light mode toggle.
A handful of follow-ups closed remaining light-mode leaks: hardcoded white text that was invisible on light backgrounds, the manifest 404 in dev, the explore dropdown's gold halo that read as warm cast on white, and the theme toggle icon (which now shows the destination state — sun on dark, moon on light — instead of the current state).
A run of visual polish ahead of public launch. The featured tool pages now have a real product-page treatment, the homepage stops shouting in amber, and the sponsor page is honest about what your money goes to.
/featured/pdf-editor, /featured/compare-pdf, and /featured/gerber-viewer got a top-to-bottom rebuild.
/sponsor rewritten end-to-end. One Stripe checkout, plain language about what sponsorship covers, no breakdown-of-my-AI-bill drama, no inflated ROI math.
PublicPageLayout (used by /featured, /changelog, /roadmap, /feature-requests) tightened: 60 px top padding → 24 px, back-link bottom margin 24 px → 14 px. Cuts roughly 45 px of dead space above the title on every page that uses the layout.
The /sponsor page has a new Stripe-powered checkout so anyone who wants to help keep the lights on can do it in a few clicks. Three options:
Sponsors can optionally display a name on the public sponsor wall (or stay anonymous) via opt-in fields during checkout. A live wall on the page shows current sponsors as soon as the first payment lands. Cancellations are self-serve through Stripe's customer portal at any time.
A redesigned 7-entry FAQ explains the flow, including the honest framing that sponsorship is not tax-deductible. Successful payments land on a new /sponsor/thanks confirmation page.
A round of polish across the editor splash template and a top-to-bottom voice cleanup of tool descriptions and FAQs. Plus a proper legal section.
The empty-state splash (PDF Editor, Gerber Viewer, every future Tier-1 tool) used to render content floating on the editor's dark canvas with two soft radial glows bleeding into the page bg, while the inner drop card carried a hard dashed rectangle. Two visual languages on the same surface — read as bot-generated.
surface-elevated background, 16 px radius, top-edge highlight line. Matches every other card on the site (roadmap, tool grids, featured cards).::before pseudo-element inside the card, so border-radius + overflow: hidden keep the gradient from spilling..pdf · .jpg · .png · .heic to just .pdf. Image upload still works for image-to-PDF, but advertising four file types on a "PDF editor" splash made it read as a multi-format converter.The three-column shape (rail · canvas · inspector) now stays stable across empty / loading / loaded states. Was: rails were gated behind doc && so the empty state showed only a centered splash with nothing on either side, and the layout reorganised the moment a file landed.
Each panel handles its own no-document hint: No board loaded · Drop an archive or use ⌘O in the rail, plus a panel-specific message in every right-pane section (Board, Layer details, Apertures, Drill, DRC, Netlist, Inspect, Measure, PnP, Test, History).
/legal/* is now a proper section: terms, privacy, cookies, accessibility, acceptable use, disclaimer, DMCA, plus a small index page that links them all. Each one is plain-language, no walls of boilerplate.
A pass over 60+ tool YAML specs and the doc surfaces that read from them:
D02-brand and D06-seo decisions updated with the resulting voice rules..kb/seo/standards.md + voice-guide.md added so future descriptions stay consistent.llms.txt synced with the new copy.scripts/_archive/ rewriters (rewrite-duplicate-faqs.mjs, rewrite-howto-step-duplicates.mjs) that did the mechanical work, archived for future use.The redesign work this round leaned on by the team is in audit-2026-05-05/ — five audit reports covering ship-readiness, featured-tool polish, support, tools-landing, AI-slop catalog, and the sponsor redesign mockup. Internal docs, not user-facing, but they shape the next few weeks of work.
Vulnerability count dropped from 26 to 17. Forced upgrades on transitive dependencies that were stuck on outdated versions: yaml (cleared a stack-overflow CVE from a deep dependency chain), uuid (cleared a bounds-check CVE), elliptic (pinned to latest for when the upstream patch lands).
The remaining 17 findings are all documented as either having no patched upstream version yet, requiring a breaking framework downgrade to clear, or being dev/server-only and not reachable from the user bundle. Documenting them keeps the audit reviewable instead of a wall of unactionable noise.
A round of polish across the whole site shell. Nothing functional changed; everything just feels less rough.
? anywhere to open a keyboard-shortcut cheatsheet. Esc closes. Same place every page.Swept the last "600+ tool factory" framing out of user-facing surfaces after the vision pivot. The dynamic tool count now comes from the actual catalogue.
Finished tidying the catalogue after last week's vision pivot. The site is now organised into 7 live tool categories plus 1 placeholder — every category page lists tools that actually exist.
Refactored the entire site navigation. The Explore mega menu and the mobile hamburger drawer were rewritten from the ground up; "Pro" is now called "Featured" everywhere.
/featured; old URLs redirect automatically.No tools changed behavior; this is purely chrome.
Loft can now be installed as a real app on Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave, iOS Safari, and macOS Safari 17+ — with an honest guide for each one and a diagnostics page users can share with us when install doesn't behave. This release closes the loop with the offline dashboard: installing usually flips your pins from "best effort" to "protected from auto-eviction" in a single tap.
Install button in the header — shows on every page, adapts to your browser:
"How install works" guide at /docs/pwa-install — straight answer to "why does install look different on my phone vs my laptop?" with per-platform steps and honest caveats about which browsers do and don't support it.
Diagnostics page at /help/pwa-diagnostics — a live health check. If install isn't working for you, visit the page and click Copy report (markdown). Paste that output into a bug report at /bug-report and we'll almost always know what's going on within minutes. The report includes your platform, whether the install prompt has fired, service worker state, manifest fetch, storage quota, and more — all signals that matter for triage, none that identify you.
The "How offline mode works" panel on /my-tools now reacts to your install state:
Two small tweaks to first-paint: added a preconnect for the Phosphor Icons CDN (icons appear ~200-400ms sooner on cold connections) and bumped the Apple home-screen icon from 192px to 512px for sharper rendering on retina devices.
PWA install is the least-standardized thing on the modern web. We did our best to make the button mean the same thing everywhere, but the reality is that Apple and Mozilla ship different capabilities, and Chrome holds back its install prompt until it decides you've engaged enough with the site. If install doesn't look or work the way you expect, the diagnostics page is the fastest path to an answer — from us or from you figuring it out yourself.
The product was ready; the surface around it wasn't. This shipment puts everything in place for a real public launch: legal pages you can read, real support forms you can fill out, and a way to vote on what gets built next.
Three forms now live, each with its own page and its own labeled GitHub issue under the hood:
/bug-report — pick the tool, describe what happened, what you expected, your browser and OS. Submissions land as a labeled bug issue in our private tracker./request-a-tool — name a tool you want, describe what it should do, point at similar tools you've used. The roadmap is shaped largely by what people ask for./feedback — open-ended. Comments, ideas, hellos./support — landing page that points you at whichever of the three you need.Submissions go through Cloudflare Turnstile (invisible bot check) and are written to a private GitHub issue tracker, never to a third-party form service. No account needed to submit.
The /feature-requests page is now interactive. Click the upvote button on any feature you want and the count updates immediately. The page is grouped by status so you can see what's accepted, planned, under review, proposed, or declined at a glance.
How votes stay private: the server stores a one-way hash of your IP plus the feature ID. The hash can't be reversed to identify you and can't be linked across features. Same person, same feature → silently no-op. No accounts, no cookies, no tracking pixel.
/about — the story behind Loft Tools, what makes it different, who built it./privacy — what we collect (very little) and what we don't (almost everything)./terms — minimum-viable terms of service in plain language./cookies — explicit "no tracking cookies" statement plus what is stored locally on your device./404 and /500 — branded error pages that suggest a tool to try or let you report the issue.Everything still runs locally in your browser. The forms and voting are the only things that talk to a server, and even those don't store anything that identifies you.
The offline dashboard shipped a few weeks ago but was hidden — you had to know the /my-tools URL existed. It's now a first-class surface with a permanent home in the header, a plain-English guide to how offline actually works, and per-tool freshness indicators. The category browse experience got an overhaul at the same time: the mega menu now previews tools on hover, and the filter pane moved out of the sidebar so tool cards use the full page width.
A new My Tools link lives in the main nav on every page — between Pro and Docs on desktop, second in the mobile drawer. It carries a live count pill showing how many tools you've pinned for offline. Click it to land on your dashboard.
The count updates in real time as you pin or unpin anywhere on the site, and stays in sync across multiple tabs open on Loft.
Your dashboard now opens with an About offline mode panel that answers the questions people actually ask:
The panel also includes a live storage meter (how much of your quota we're using), a persistence chip (green if your browser has granted persistent storage; a button to request it if not), and a Clear offline cache action that removes all cached assets in one click when you want to start fresh.
Every pinned tool card now shows one of three states:
If you've never pinned a tool, the dashboard now shows a 3-step explainer — Find a tool → Save offline → Use anywhere — with the full offline guide expanded underneath. No more landing on "No tools pinned yet" with no idea what to do next.
The Explore menu in the header used to be a 16-cell grid where clicking was the only way to see a category's tools. Now it's a two-pane layout: a list of all 16 categories on the left, and on the right a live preview of the top tools in whichever category your cursor is on — with a "View all X tools" link to the full listing.
Hover PDF → see Compare PDF, Merge PDF, Sign PDF, and the rest. Hover Finance → see Mortgage Calculator, Loan EMI, Retirement Planner. No page load, no commitment.
The filter pane used to sit as a 240px sidebar next to the tool grid, squeezing cards into a narrow lane. It's now a full-width horizontal bar above the grid: search input always visible, type/tag filters tucked behind a Filters button that shows a count pill when you've got any applied, and Pro-only as a dedicated chip.
Tool cards now use the full page width — noticeably bigger, easier to scan, better use of your screen.
Under the hood, hero eyebrows, audience chips, FAQ accordions, and filter chips were consolidated into shared components — so pages across Loft look and feel like one product, and future pages inherit the polish by default.