The Stately team has had another busy week. The editor now has event schemas, and we’ve made many more improvements. Let’s dig in!

Event schemas are now available in the editor. You can access the event schemas from the panel. The event schema enables you to define events for the current machine, including all of the events’ properties, including, but not limited to, the event description.

You can search for available events from the event schema panel, edit their details, and create new events. Any events you aren’t using in your machine have less opacity, and you can delete all unused events from the button and choose .

You can also view the schema for any event by selecting that event on the canvas and opening the panel.

The role in Stately Teams is now free and does not count towards your number of seats. You can now see how many available seats you have left on your team from the Team page and the Billing page.

We’ve improved the interface for generating flows to make it easier and faster. You can now access the history of text descriptions you used for your current machine from the button in the dialog. Use the button to copy a preview prompt into the description field to try it again!

The machine’s root state now has a minimal borderless appearance by default, giving you more space to focus on your machine. If you change the root state’s color or add a description, action, or any other block type, the root state will revert to its classic bordered design and the same features as any other parent state.

We fixed a bug where a machine name was not correctly updated when you renamed its root state.

Our Pro users can now export state machines to Markdown and as stories. These formats give you more options for sharing your flows with non-developer teammates and in other environments, such as documentation. Access these formats from the dropdown menu in the panel.

Export to Markdown has been a long-requested feature. The Markdown-formatted flow contains a flattened list of states and transitions, where each transition is linked to its target state, enabling you to click through a text version of your state machine. Each state and transition includes descriptions, guards, and a list of actions and invoked actors.

At Stately, we believe state machines are incredibly valuable for generating user stories. Exporting to the stories format lists all the happy paths from the initial state to other states in your flow. These happy paths help document use cases against project requirements and generate test cases.

These new export formats are in beta. If you have any feedback, please let us know on Discord.

Yet another new Pro feature for you this week: you can now lock machines to prevent accidental edits. Lock a machine using the lock icon button in the machine Details panel.

Locking a machine prevents you or anyone else on your team, from editing, deleting, or renaming a machine. It will also prevent anyone from importing code to replace the machine or restoring a past version of the machine.

Locked machines have a Locked status displayed in the editor’s top bar. If you hover over the Locked status, you’ll get a tooltip detailing who locked the machine and when.

If somebody else is viewing or editing the machine when it is locked, their changes will not be saved, and they will be notified that the machine is now locked.

Try all our Pro features free on our 30 day trial

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Read more about locking machines in our docs.

As a Stately Pro user, you can now auto-create machines from text descriptions with our new experimental feature, . You can generate a flow for a new machine or use the flow description to describe how you want to modify your current flow.

There are so many reasons you might want to generate your flows, including:

With 1000 calls a month, and a free 30-day Pro trial, get ready to create state machines in no time!

You can now choose to export state and event descriptions and meta fields with your exported code.

Find the and toggles in the Code panel.

Our new Learn Stately guidance got its own changelog this week, but there’s more that’s new to Stately:

You can now reorder guarded transitions by moving them up or down in order.

And the options to add a guard and add a transition to an existing transition have been split into two distinct actions in the menu.

We’ve just released a new way for new users to learn Stately. We’ve designed our Learn Stately guidance and accompanying tutorials to introduce the basic concepts of state machines, demonstrate how to build them, simulate them, export them to code, and implement them with the exported code.

The highlight of our Learn Stately guidance is two short videos (less than 8 minutes total!) that provide a step-by-step guide to using Stately and cover the basics of state machines.

The Learn Stately guidance is triggered automatically when a new user visits the Stately editor or if they haven’t viewed the guidance before. You can also relaunch the modal anytime from the Editor menu by selecting Help > Learn Stately or from the Help drawer by selecting Learn Stately.

We’ve also updated the tutorials in the Help drawer. We designed the tutorials as a refresher for the concepts learned in the videos and a quick start guide to Stately. They offer a brief overview of the features and functions of Stately, including how to create, edit, and simulate state machines.

You can always check out our Stately and XState docs if you need further tutorials and examples. The docs cover everything from the basics of state machines to advanced implementation with XState.

This week’s headlines are that annotations now support markdown, and we’ve made many performance improvements…

Markdown is now supported in annotations! Previously you could only use plain text in your annotations; now, you can use markdown, like in descriptions.

Create an annotation by right-clicking anywhere on the canvas.

We have more fixes and improvements for you this week: