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Changelog

New updates and improvements to Linear.


Series A, Roadmap, OAuth2 and Big Sur logo

Linear 2020.12 release

To help give a holistic picture of what is new in Linear, we created a new Linear Release page which highlights new features as well as major improvements developed in the last six months. The theme for the second half of 2020 was to improve the core experience of Linear. We launched easy list selection, view options, custom views, SAML SSO, themes and more.

Series A funding with Sequoia Capital

Today, we’re announcing that we’ve raised USD 13M in Series A funding led by Sequoia Capital. We worked with Stephanie Zhan and her team on the seed round and are excited to partner with them again in this next phase of the company. Our mission is to re-envision the principles and practices of software building and make it feel magical again. Tools should fit seamlessly into your workflow and help you execute faster, collaborate quickly and focus on work. The next generation of startups is building their products on Linear and this funding helps us level up Linear to support them even more.

Read more about the investment in our Medium post.

Roadmap

Setting direction is one of the most important things you’ll do when building a product and company. You can now organize your projects under milestones by enabling Roadmap in your workspace settings. Once enabled, you can create milestones that are shared by all teams in the workspace and associate projects with these milestones, essentially creating a prioritized roadmap of projects.

Additionally, we've redesigned the team projects views as lists to make it more glanceable and consistent with the rest of the application. You can define the project lead and members of a project now as well, to communicate project ownership to the rest of the company.

Linear Method: Roadmap

We design Linear based on the principles and practices we use in product development. Today, we're sharing our first in-depth post on the Linear Method which is, unsurprisingly, about roadmaps: what they are, how you can use them, and why they're so helpful for building high quality products. People often ask us how we use Linear at Linear, so we explain how we use roadmaps, too. Read it here.

OAuth2 authentication for API

To make it easier to build integrations on Linear's GraphQL API, we added a new authentication method, OAuth2. Unlike previous personal API keys, OAuth2 makes it easier for your users to authenticate with your application and Linear. We also added more fine-grained scopes to the API so that you can only get the access you need. Several companies have already built their integrations on OAuth2, including Jam, and our Zapier integration is using it as well.

To start developing a new Linear OAuth application, head to your API settings and create a new application. To view applications that you have authorized to access your account, go to your application settings.

Read more in the Linear OAuth2 documentation.

New sub-issue editor

Two weeks ago we announced the new sub-issues editor as a Linear Preview. It features drag&drop reordering, faster composing and other improvements. Today we're rolling out the new experience to all Linear users. Open any issue, hit CmdShiftO and add new sub-issues one by one.

ProTip: When composing a sub-issue, save it with CmdEnter and add another one.

Big Sur app icon

We craft Linear to give our users the best experience in the Mac OS environment, paying attention to details. This new app icon fits better with the new Big Sur icon design guidelines. We hope this icon will find a prominent place on your dock. You should get the automatic update later today or you can download the new version manually from here.

Other improvements and fixes

  • The desktop application now lets you clear all application data in case of unforeseen problems
  • You can now Tab and ShiftTab through issue lists in addition to using the and keys.
  • The loading logo now correctly switches between light and dark modes for custom themes
  • The target date for a project can now be set via the keyboard shortcut CmdD