Review:
neo Draw - Jonas Gruber - Bach & Gruber Holding Ltd.

I discovered neo Draw when I was looking for Paint for WordPress and found exactly that. A very intuitive and powerful drawing tool. Unlike Paint, neo Draw has well chosen color palettes. ;) I especially like the consistent drawing look with the matching font. The whole design looks very cohesive and well thought out. The integrated icon library includes emojis, a wide selection of icons and even animated GIFs. You can also add your own images, GIFs and icons to the drawings. Thanks for the valuable tool!

Through a software developer from neo WP I got early access to neo Draw. I actually only wanted to create a few drawings until I realized what is possible with neo Draw. You can draw anything easily: logos, icons, tables, decorations, ... It is also possible to draw and paint over existing images. With the link function I even drew my own buttons and linked them. Particularly brilliant is that everything can be animated with just one click, which looks very impressive.

In the beta test I already had the opportunity to create some animations. It is child’s play. There are many ways to control and modify the animations, especially the playback in the frontend. I especially liked the integration of scroll and hover animations that give my website that extra something. For example I created a graphic that builds up piece by piece when you scroll to that spot. That gives my website additional expressiveness.

As part of the beta tester team I was able to extensively test neo Animate in different WordPress environments. neo Animate is not comparable to elaborate animation tools. I tried it with one of my neoDraw drawings: you just have to choose what should be animated when and it immediately looks great! The editor is really brilliant. In the frontend the animation plays smoothly and draws attention. Incredible that something like this works directly in WordPress. Thanks for these new possibilities!

Already in the development phase I was able to take a close look at neo Optimize. The plugin does first of all everything a lazy loader should do. It delays loading images. I was amazed when I found that even loading of background images is reliably deferred. Like all neo plugins I have tested so far neo Lazy is solidly implemented. I am very satisfied.

I was able to install the neoOptimize plugin on my own website during the beta phase. As a photographer, I have many high-resolution images on my site. So I needed to make sure the images only load when they are actually displayed - otherwise the page load times were too long. With neo Lazy it's very simple. No configuration is needed for the plugin. Just install it and the plugin will reliably do its job with the default settings. I was done in 5 minutes and had a noticeably faster site.

As a beta tester I was already able to use neo Motion. Unlike neo Animate, neo Motion also allows displacements of elements and I can precisely control how my drawing moves. Step by step I created my own animation. Embedding into the frontend can also be configured. With neo Motion I can flexibly adjust framerate and delay time. I have full control over playback in the frontend. If neo Animate seems too limiting, the more extensive neoMotion plugin is the right choice.

Thanks the test session was great! I would love to use neo Motion in production already please release the plugin soon! With neo Motion everything is possible. Each frame can be created individually with neo Draw. Yes it is a bit of work but the effort is forgotten as soon as you press the save button and see the result. The animations on the website were really created by the guys from neo WP with their own plugin. I could only believe it after the test session. Really well implemented!

I was among the first to try neo Motion in an early beta version. The neo Motion plugin is basically the flipbook for neoDraw drawings. With neo Motion I can let myself go artistically. Frame by frame impressive stop-motion videos emerge from line drawings. A useful trick I like to share is to draw the frames in a sketch style. That way even stationary lines begin to tremble slightly from frame to frame. That makes the animation come alive! With the dynamic animations neo Motion gives every creation on the website a unique touch.

As a beta tester I was able to test neo Optimize extensively. What is very well solved about neo Optimize is that all images and the entire content folder remain untouched. The plugin creates thumbnails in a separate folder and leaves the database 100% unchanged. I have not seen such a solution in any other media optimize plugin so far.