Last week, we released version 1.51 of the Wolfram Cloud to wolframcloud.com. Detailed release notes can be found here: https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/release-notes/1.51.nb
Below are some of the highlights.
Click-to-copy for non-editable cells
In cloud notebooks, output cells are generally not editable and selections within them didn't work very well since browsers had a hard time dealing with their structure. To make it easy to still "grab" some output, we added click-to-copy: You just need to click an output cell to copy its whole content to the clipboard. You can then paste it into another cell, cloud notebook, desktop Mathematica, or any other application (rich structures might not be preserved in other applications, though).
Click-to-copy is disabled on controls that are interactive by themselves, e.g. buttons, sliders and graphics (which you can select individually), in order not to interfere with that interactivity.
Of course, the longer-term goal is to actually support the same granular selection mechanism as on desktop.
Evaluate in Place
You can evaluate expressions "in place" now, just like in desktop notebooks. Just select a (sub) expression in an Input cell and press Ctrl+Shift+Enter (on Windows) or Cmd+Enter (on Mac) to evaluate it, replacing the original expression with the result from the computation.
InputForm-based input
Since cloud notebooks don't support the feature-rich "two-dimensional" input found in desktop Mathematica yet, we added a new control that allows you to enter a textual representation of various typesetting constructs (what we call InputForm) and turns it into the corresponding two-dimensional boxes. Press Ctrl+Shift+1 (or, put differently: Ctrl+!) to bring up the input field and press Enter to "resolve" it into its typeset form. It works both in Input cells (with the right evaluation semantics) and textual cells.
You can enter x/y
for a fraction, x^y
for superscripts, Sqrt[x]
for square roots, and various other forms. Clicking the resulting output brings you back to the edit mode.
The control is quite similar to Ctrl+= for free-form linguistic input in the Wolfram Language. We're working on another similar control that would allow entering TeX syntax.
Cell group openers and closers
We now have the same cell group openers and closers as desktop Mathematica (version 12). Closed cell groups have a little arrow attached to them to open the group, which makes the content within them easier to discover. If you use that opener, there will also be a corresponding closer.
Improved support for special Unicode characters
Cloud notebooks are now better at rendering non-plane-0 Unicode characters, e.g. emojis. If you know their hexadecimal code point, you can enter them using the special \|xxxxxx
notation, or you might use some built-in OS functionality (e.g. Ctrl+Cmd+Space on Mac). They work in text as well as in computations.
Extended Unicode support isn't perfect yet: ToCharacterCode
still splits up non-plane-0 characters into surrogate pairs (this will be changed in Cloud 1.52), and the editor cursor can be moved "inside" emojis (this will be improved in the longer term).
There are many other new features and we fixed quite a few bugs as well. Check out the release notes if you want to read about all the details.
Please let us know if you have any questions or comments.