Changelog

Unlumen UI 2.0 is the biggest release in the project’s history.

This is more than a new coat of paint. The app, component browser, preview experience, documentation, account system, and public registry have all been rethought as one product. Unlumen UI is also officially open source: the documentation and public registry now live in a dedicated MIT-licensed repository, ready to be inspected, forked, improved, and shaped by the community.

The goal for 2.0 was simple: make discovering a component feel inspiring, make evaluating it feel effortless, and make owning the code feel obvious.

Unlumen UI is now open source

• MIT-licensed public code — the documentation app and public registry components can be used, copied, modified, distributed, and shipped in commercial projects under the MIT license.
• A real contribution path — the repository now includes contribution guidelines, issue and pull request templates, automated CI, dependency updates, a code of conduct, and a private security reporting process.
• A cleaner public registry — registry sources have been reorganized around a focused, flat primitives structure. Generated shadcn outputs remain easy to inspect, install, and own.
• Clear boundaries — public components and documentation are open. Pro components, licensing services, and private product APIs remain distributed separately under their own terms.

This is the direction Unlumen UI was always moving toward: not a black box, but a collection of ideas you can learn from, adapt, and make yours.

A complete redesign of the app

Every major surface has been rebuilt around a calmer visual language, stronger typography, more intentional motion, and a clearer sense of hierarchy.

• New homepage — a redesigned hero, richer component storytelling, an expanded showcase, testimonials, credits, FAQs, and more deliberate transitions from discovery to installation.
• New navigation system — the header, page chrome, account navigation, and mobile navigation now behave as one responsive system across the site.
• New component gallery — component cards, filtering, view states, thumbnails, video previews, and responsive layouts have all been redesigned to make a large catalog faster to scan.
• New component pages — demos now get more space, controls are easier to reach, and the surrounding UI stays out of the way while you explore.
• New pricing experience — redesigned plans, interactive visual effects, animated values, clearer Pro positioning, and dynamic Studio seat pricing make the upgrade path easier to understand.
• Better polish everywhere — theme switching, tooltips, sidebars, spacing, color tokens, loading states, responsive behavior, and accessibility details received a full pass.

It should feel faster, quieter, and more alive — the interface moves when it has something to communicate, not just because it can.

A new way to experience components

The preview panel has been rebuilt into a proper interactive workspace.

• Draggable source drawer — open the implementation without leaving the demo, resize the workspace naturally, and dismiss it with a gesture.
• Live component controls — tune supported props directly from the preview toolbar and see changes immediately.
• Adaptive preview surfaces — previews can opt into surface or page backgrounds, scroll-aware layouts, and smooth background transitions.
• Improved code presentation — source code uses dedicated syntax themes and a layout designed for longer, production-sized components.
• Responsive controls — the toolbar, drawer, settings, Pro states, and mobile experience now share the same interaction model.
• Stronger media previews — generated thumbnails and refined video handling make the gallery faster to browse before opening a component.

The result is a tighter loop: discover, inspect, tweak, understand, install.

New component: Pixel Scroll Transition

2.0 introduces Pixel Scroll Transition, a canvas-powered transition that turns scroll progress into a configurable pixel wipe between sections.

Choose a direction, mix in patterns such as random, checker, diagonal, wave, spiral, or radial, tune the easing and pixel grid, and add temporary accent-color bands for a more expressive reveal. It supports both sticky full-page transitions and inline scroll containers, responds to theme changes, scales for device pixel ratio, and rebuilds cleanly on resize.

Install it with:

npx shadcn@latest add @unlumen-ui/pixel-scroll-transition

Component upgrades

• Smart Animate Text now handles changing letters and numeric values character by character, understands numeric direction, supports mount animations, and keeps separators stable while values change.
• Tilt Card has been refined with a more expressive tilt treatment and badge support.
• Vertical Marquee and Slider received behavior and presentation improvements.
• Math Graph now has a more robust expression layer for safer, more predictable rendering.
• Pixel Scroll Transition includes a dedicated video preview and full documentation for inline and sticky use cases.

Accounts and Pro access, rebuilt

The old activation flow has been replaced by a complete account experience.

• Passwordless sign-in with secure, expiring magic links.
• Automatic entitlement linking for the email attached to a Polar purchase.
• License key management with reveal and copy actions, plus a ready-to-use UNLUMEN_LICENSE_KEY environment snippet.
• Billing and purchases accessible through the secure Polar customer portal.
• Session security with active-device visibility and the ability to sign out other sessions.
• A consistent account menu across desktop and mobile navigation.

Pro access now feels like part of the product instead of a separate activation step.

Documentation, now independent

The documentation has moved into its own standalone application and repository. Existing /docs traffic is redirected to the new deployment, while the docs can now evolve, ship, and accept contributions independently from the commercial app.

The docs UI received the same 2.0 treatment: clearer navigation, a refined sidebar, improved code blocks and prop tables, better mobile behavior, updated accessibility guidance, and a public registry focused on the components that can actually be redistributed.

Under the hood

• Registry sources, demos, generated metadata, and public install outputs have been cleaned up and aligned.
• Public primitives now use simpler canonical paths instead of category-heavy internal nesting.
• Preview tooling gained thumbnail generation and video preparation workflows.
• Authentication, account data, entitlement persistence, and deployment redirects were rebuilt for the new architecture.
• The stack is fully aligned around React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS 4, Motion, Next.js 15, Fumadocs, and the shadcn registry format.

Upgrading to 2.0

Most component consumers do not need a migration: keep installing components through their documented shadcn command and the source will continue to land directly in your project.

If you linked to old documentation internals or imported files directly from the former nested registry source tree, switch to the canonical documentation URLs and generated @unlumen-ui/* registry names. New public documentation and primitive contributions should target the standalone docs repository.

2.0 is the new foundation for Unlumen UI: more open, more focused, and much more ambitious. The code is yours. The direction is shared. And this is only the beginning.

This update makes the site faster to navigate, improves the homepage presentation, and adds a new social proof section.

• Search index API — the command menu now uses a dynamic search index, making docs and component discovery more useful from anywhere on the site.
• Command menu improvements — search results now handle indexed content more cleanly, with better grouping and interaction polish.
• Component showcase — the homepage now includes a richer animated showcase area for highlighting components with video-ready previews.
• Testimonials — new testimonial section with tweet-style integration for stronger product context on the homepage.
• Hover Feature Cards — new installable component for animated feature cards, with docs and registry output included.
• Video source handling — component previews and showcase videos now handle sources more consistently.
• Site stability — pricing, routing, not-found states, and layout details received small cleanup fixes.

This cycle adds a new batch of installable components, a cleaner preview workflow for recordings, and stronger guardrails around component pages and registry publishing.

• Square Pattern — interactive grid background that responds to hover and can now auto-animate for ambient motion.
• File Tree — animated file explorer component with matching file primitives for repo mockups, docs layouts, and showcase UIs.
• Apple Switch, Motion FAQs Accordion, and Stacked Feature Cards — three new installable components for toggles, expandable FAQ blocks, and layered content sections.
• Motion Navigation Menu — new animated navigation component, with registry dependency metadata fixed so installs resolve correctly.
• Preview film mode — component pages now support a cleaner recording layout for capture-ready demos.
• Preview resilience — preview failures are now isolated behind dedicated error boundaries instead of taking down the whole component page.
• Registry validation — source and generated registry checks are stricter now, which should catch broken component metadata before publish.
• Pricing updates — the pricing page now shows CLI pull counts and loads heavy video content more efficiently.

Pro components are now visible in the public registry index, so AI agents, the shadcn MCP, and catalog tools can discover them without needing to probe endpoints blindly.

What changed

Previously, pro component slugs were excluded from registry.json. Tools that read the index to build a component list would miss them entirely, and agents that tried to probe individual endpoints would hit rate limits.

Pro components now appear in registry.json with files: [] and a meta.premium flag. The source is still protected — the route handler requires a valid license key before returning any code. The index just lets agents know the components exist and what license is needed.

For AI agents

When an agent reads the registry and encounters a pro component, it sees:

{
  "name": "glow",
  "meta": {
    "premium": true,
    "requiresAuth": "Bearer token required. Set UNLUMEN_LICENSE_KEY in .env.local and configure components.json. See https://ui.unlumen.com/docs/mcp"
  }
}

No ambiguous 404. No silent skip. The agent knows what's needed and can tell the user.

/r/registry-licensed.json

A new authenticated endpoint returns the full index including pro metadata. Useful for catalog tools that want a single authenticated fetch rather than reading the public index.

MCP docs updated

The MCP page now includes a Pro section with the full components.json setup for license-authenticated installs.

This release adds three new components and includes a round of TypeScript build fixes to improve reliability in strict production builds.

• Perspective Flow — animated layered flow effect with perspective depth, useful for hero sections and motion-heavy showcases.
• Horizontal Depth Fade — horizontal fade treatment that adds a soft depth transition on the sides of content containers.
• Animate Digits — animated number display component for counters and stats with smooth digit transitions.

Build fixes (user impact)

If you install or reuse these primitives in strict TypeScript setups, builds should be more predictable now. A set of polymorphic components were adjusted to avoid edge cases where type inference could fail only during production checks.

Build fixes (dev note)

I had a recurring never typing pattern in polymorphic React components (as + generic element types). The fix was to make rendering and icon typings more explicit in key primitives and docs components so TypeScript can resolve props consistently in next build.

One new component and a configurability improvement.

• Gooey SVG Filter — SVG filter that makes adjacent animated elements fluidly merge together with a gooey effect. Wrap it around any animated group.
• MotionTabsMenu — spring properties (stiffness, damping, mass) are now fully exposed in the settings panel so you can tune the feel without touching code.

Three new components.

• Motion Tabs Menu — floating bottom tab bar that expands upward with spring animations to reveal tab-specific content. Direction-aware slide transitions between tabs.
• Scroll Reveal Image — scroll-driven image reveal with spring-physics width expansion, zoom-out, and border-radius animation.
• Vertical Marquee — two columns of images scrolling vertically in opposite directions with a progressive blur fade at the edges.

Three new components.

• Inline Testimonials — testimonials flowing inline as text with circular avatars. Hover any quote to blur the rest and reveal the author's name and role.
• Side by Side Slide — before/after image comparison with a spring-animated draggable divider. Horizontal and vertical orientations supported.
• Sidebar Toggle Icon — animated SVG icon that morphs between open and closed sidebar states using path interpolation.

Two new components plus a visual refresh across the site.

• AI Chat — animated chat UI with reply-to threading and spring-driven message bubbles. Drop it in as a demo shell or wire it up to a real backend.
• Video Ambient — video player that samples the current frame and projects a soft ambient glow behind the player using a canvas layer. Zero configuration required.

Icons

Site icons switched from Lucide to Hugeicons — bigger selection, same free tier. Registry components still ship with Lucide since it's more widely used in the community.

Also added a custom animated sidebar icon for the /components section, inspired by the skiper-ui design.

One new component and a handful of quality-of-life improvements to the site itself.

• Glowing Button — animated button treatment for high-emphasis actions. Install with npx shadcn@latest add @unlumen-ui/glow.

Fullscreen preview

The fullscreen expand/collapse in component previews now accounts for the sidebar. When the sidebar is open the panel slides to fill only the remaining space — no more layout jump mid-animation.

A fairly big visual pass landed this cycle — mostly things you feel rather than notice. Six new installable components ship alongside it.

• Switch — animated toggle with smooth thumb transition.
• ThemeSwitch — same primitive, pre-wired to next-themes so it just works.
• Tilt — spring-driven 3D wrapper that reacts to the cursor. Compose it around anything.
• Tilt Card — built on the Tilt primitive; adds a floating image slot and a radial shine that follows the cursor.
• Text Reveal — scroll-triggered word-by-word or character-by-character reveal.
• Tooltip Preview — link tooltip that shows a live preview of the target on hover.

Design system

All colour tokens were audited and consolidated. Dark mode used to have a noticeably different sidebar background — it now matches --background so the sidebar feels like part of the page rather than a separate panel. Chart colours shifted to warm coral tones. The logo in the top-left switched from a PNG to an inline SVG so it stays sharp at any resolution and flips instantly with the theme.

Sidebar

Each section in the docs sidebar now has its own icon, making it faster to orient yourself. The fisheye magnification on link hover was removed — it looked cool but made the sidebar feel restless. TypeTable backgrounds are now transparent so they inherit the page colour correctly in both light and dark mode.

Small release — one new utility component and some under-the-hood site hygiene.

• DownloadFile — drop-in component that exposes a file download button backed by a Next.js API route (/api/download/[name]). Useful for letting users grab component source files or assets directly from a doc page.

Site improvements

Added robots.txt, sitemap.xml, and llms.txt for better search engine and AI crawler indexing. Open Graph URLs and page metadata were also tightened up across the docs.

New components and pro-tier improvements.

• Dia Text Reveal — animated text reveal with a sweeping gradient that highlights words as they appear. Configurable duration, spread, and easing.
• Floating Navbar — scroll-velocity-aware navigation bar with dropdown menus and smooth show/hide behaviour.
• Scramble Text — characters shuffle randomly before resolving to the final string. Good for loading states and data reveals.
• Shimmering Text — lightweight shimmer animation layered over text, no canvas required.
• Favicon Search — fetches and displays favicons for any domain, with fallback handling.
• Switch & ThemeSwitch — animated toggle primitives; ThemeSwitch wires directly into next-themes.

Open in v0

Component previews now include an Open in v0 button so you can fork any component directly into a v0 project.

Pro updates

Gravity Stars is now a pro component. The Highlight component received improved mouse-event handling and bounds management. GlowingBadge variants were refined with updated glow styles. Pricing and activation pages were redesigned.

New components added to the registry this cycle.

• Dock — macOS-style icon dock with magnification on hover.
• Magnetic Button — button that snaps toward the cursor when hovered. Good for CTAs.
• Text Reveal — word-by-word or character-by-character reveal animation triggered on scroll.
• Animated List — staggered list that animates items in as they mount.

UnlumenSlider

The settings panel now uses a custom UnlumenSlider component instead of the generic shadcn Slider. Tighter styling, same API.

Component preview CDN

Preview thumbnails in the component gallery now load from Vercel Blob instead of local paths — faster cold loads and no more 404s after deploys.

Mostly infrastructure — nothing visible in the UI, but the codebase is cleaner and easier to maintain.

Registry naming

All component install commands are now shorter — the old verbose naming is gone.

Dependency security patches

Updated several components and utilities to address security advisories.

Biggest update so far. A lot of infrastructure work this week — things that aren't flashy but make the project feel like a real product.

Premium components

Some components are now gated behind a premium flag. They still show up in the docs with full previews, but the installation tab shows a premium gate instead of the CLI command. The gate has a pixel shimmer background, a mouse-reveal spotlight, and a "Maybe later" button that morphs into a feedback text field.

Feedback API

When someone clicks "Maybe later", they can optionally leave a note. That note gets emailed directly to the team. Rate-limited to one submission per hour.

Newsletter

The Stay Tuned section on the landing page is now wired up. Subscriptions are handled cleanly — deduplication and unsubscribe links included.

Theme transition performance

The circular reveal animation on dark/light mode toggle was laggy on large screens. Fixed by compositing the animation on the GPU and shortening its duration slightly. On very wide screens the transition is skipped entirely, where it was too expensive to be smooth.

Pixel canvas stability

The Pixel Background now updates instantly on theme change — no lag, no flicker, no canvas rebuild.

A big batch of new components. Most of these came from personal projects and felt worth extracting and documenting properly.

• Command Menu — composable ⌘K command palette with fuzzy search, custom groups, built-in theme switcher, and animated content reveal. This one took a while to get right.
• Orbiting Skills — animated badges that orbit a center element. On desktop the ring follows the cursor on hover; on mobile it's always visible. Good for hero sections and about pages.
• Progressive Blur — stacked backdrop-filter layers that create a smooth edge blur without any color overlay. Drop it at the top or bottom of a scrollable container.
• Tilt — spring-animated 3D tilt wrapper that reacts to cursor position. Primitive you can wrap around anything.
• Tilt Card — built on top of the Tilt primitive. Adds a floating image slot, badge variants, and a radial shine that follows the cursor.
• Cursor — custom cursor with a follower element. Velocity-based squish and skew on fast moves.
• Math Graph — real-time SVG math plotter with pan & zoom, crosshair tooltip, and support for multiple simultaneous expressions. Genuinely had no idea this would turn out this cool.
• Count Up — number counter that springs to its target value when it enters the viewport. Supports decimals, separators, and direction.

Filling out the library with utility-heavy components that work well as building blocks.

• Pixel Background — interactive canvas with tiny pixel particles that ripple outward from the center on hover. Configurable gap, speed, and palette.
• Gravity Stars — canvas background with gravity-driven star particles. Hover to attract or repel, click to spawn new ones.
• Clipped Circle — cursor-following soft glow spotlight inside a container. Pure CSS, no canvas.
• Copy Button — copy-to-clipboard button with animated icon swap and confirmation state.
• Glow Button — conic-gradient glow layer with six animation modes. Fully configurable colours and blur strength.
• Refresh Button — icon button that spins on click, with support for async callbacks. Handy for reloading live data or component previews.

First public version. The project was originally called Animate UI — renamed to Unlumen UI to better reflect where it's going.

The idea is simple: a registry of animated React components you can install with the shadcn CLI. Components are copied directly into your codebase, so you own the code and there's no dependency lock-in.

Included in this release:

• Floating Tooltip — cursor-following tooltip with velocity-based squish and skew. Supports a main label and an optional description. First component, and still one of my favourites.
• Core primitives and hooks shared across components.
• Documentation site built with Fumadocs.

More components coming fast — this was mostly about getting the foundation right.