ForeUI is an easy-to-use UI prototyping tool, designed to create mockup / wireframe / prototypes for any application or website you have in mind.

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ForeUI 5.0: Retina Support, Bezier Curve, and Better Code Editor

Hello everyone, today we are so glad to announce the release of ForeUI version 5.0!

What’s New?

Since this version, ForeUI fully supports Retina and other HD displays. The icons in ForeUI are remade so they have can high quality in Retina display.

maingui

You will notice a new element named “Bezier Curve” is added into the element panel now. You can freely control the shape of bezier curve by dragging its 4 control points in the editing area.

bezier_curves

The bezier curve element unlocks a lot of possibilities for creating complex geometric figure in ForeUI, and you can still get the identical look of these figure in exported PDF and HTML5 simulation.

The Html, Css and Script elements have much better code editors now. The code editor can now highlight the syntax and allows folding the code, which makes reviewing and editing much easier.

code_editors

The table editor can now import CSV file as the table content. Just click this new button in the toolbar and you can choose to import different formats of CSV files.

csv_import

A full list of new features and enhancements can be found here.

How to Update?

The version 5.0 is a major update. If you are using older version already, you will not be able to update it via the online updater, and you will have to download the new installer here and install it.

ForeUI V4.5: Set Starting Page for Simulation

Dear ForeUI users, ForeUI V4.5 is now available! Let’s see what’s included in this new version:

Set Starting Page for Simulation

Now you can set the starting page for HTML5 simulation, no matter where the page is located. Before V4.5, the starting page is always the first available page, and you need to define some behavior in the first page to jump to the starting page you want. This task can be done much easier now, and you only need to tick the checkbox in the page information panel.

SetAsStartingPage

It is as simple as that, once you set a page as the starting page, it will be the default page when you run the HTML5 simulation in web browser.

Quick Define “Manipulate Element…” Action

In this version, we added another quick define action, which allows you to quickly manipulate elements.

OnClicked_Manipulate_Element

After clicking this new menu item, the “Manipulate Elements…” window will show up and you can immediately choose which elements, and how to manipulate them. The behavior will be defined automatically and added into the behavior panel.

Support Undo/Redo for Table Editing

A rather big enhancement in this new version is to support undo and redo operation for table editing. In previous versions you can not undo any modification when the table editor is opened, now you can undo/redo every step of your table editing. This enhancement makes table editing much easier as you don’t need to be too careful, and every mistake could be undone.

UndoTableEditing

How to Get New Version

You can download the latest version from the download page, or upgrade directly within ForeUI if you already have any 4.x version installed.

ForeUI V3.60 is Released

ForeUI V3.60 is now released. This version brings you the official support of multi-threading simulation, new action for string processing and new option to show/hide non-current pages in the online view. Please read the details below:

Multi-Threading Simulation

You may already know that Javascript runs in single thread. If you write Javascript manually, you will pay extra efforts to simulate multi-threading. When your scenario becomes complicated, simulating parallel tasks will become more and more difficult, and sometimes even not doable. Before V3.60, we could use this workaround to simulate the multi-threading. Now we have the official solution: the new “Parallel Branching” flow control allows you to run multiple tasks parallelly.

Here is a video that demonstrate an HTML5 animation that uses this new feature. You may also run it on your own browser.


Text String Processing

When you store the custom property as string type, it will be converted to string variable during the simulation. So you can always use the Javascript built-in functions for string processing. However, not everyone is familiar with Javascript APIs, and some ForeUI users are not programers. An easier way for string processing will be very useful, so here it comes.

The new “Grab Value from Property” action provides what you want. You simply specify an property as input string, which could be a custom property, element property or system property; then you choose whether to trim the white characters and/or tags, and maybe specify the range of position so you just grab part of the string, finally save what you get in a custom property for future usage.

Instead of grabbing the content from input string, you can also take the length of content, just choose “Length of Content” from the “Grab Value” drop-down list.

This new action will be very useful for processing the result of “Get JSON Object” and “Get Remote Content” actions, since the data returned from Internet may contain white characters and tags, and you may want to check if it really contains what you want.

Show/Hide Non-Current Pages in Outline View

Outline view can show you what elements are stored in every page. However if your plot is complex, you may want to show only the current page content in the outline view. This could be achieved by turning on the new option on the bottom of the outline view:

Other Changes

In V3.60, we make a lot of efforts to optimize the performance of Table element (in simulation). We are happy to announce that we have accelerated the action for appending/inserting/deleting table row, and the speed to perform the same operation is increased for more than 500%! What’s more, selecting row/column/cell within the Table is also speed up for 300%+! So the Table in the HTML5 simulation is much more responsive now.

We also fixed some bugs in this update, please check out the update history for more details.

Christmas and New Year Special Offer: Save 20%

Dear friends, Christmas and New Year is coming.  We wish you a merry Christmas and happy New Year!

During the last few days in year 2013, we offer 20% discount for every one who are interested in purchasing ForeUI.  You can click here for more details.

Meanwhile we start to enter the “lite” working mode.  We still check emails and forum, so feel free to contact us if you have anything.

ForeUI V3.50: Many Useful New Features

ForeUI V3.50 is released today.  This version brings us a lot of new features.

Run Simulation on Touch Screen Device

One of the most interesting new feature is to get much better experience on running ForeUI simulation on touch screen device.

It is now possible to switch page by sliding the touch screen, which makes the simulation looks cool and is easier to play with when running on a touch screen device (smart phone, tablet, touch screen laptop etc.).  The tapping on touch screen could also be converted to normal mouse clicking.  To enable these features, you need to turn on two new options in settings window:

We also make some enhancements to make sure all elements could work well on touch screen device.  The video below shows how good it could be:



Embed Raw HTML/CSS/Javascript Code into Simulation

Since this version, ForeUI supports 3 new, special elements: Html, Css and Script.  They are special because they are not visible in HTML5 simulation, instead they insert their content (raw HTML, CSS or Javascript code) into the simulation.

That will be very cool as you could define and call your own Javascript function in ForeUI simulation, override some elements’ look by embedding a CSS block, or add new HTML content into ForeUI simulation.  These new elements give you the flexibility to do almost anything you want.  However please keep in mind that, embedding incorrect raw code may cause unexpected result in your simulation.  So please don’t use it until you think you have to, and you know how to do it correctly.

New “Get Remote Content” Action (Cross Domain)

ForeUI supports the “Get JSON Object” action since 3.0 version, which allows your simulation to retrieve data from remote server.  We have a blog post to introduce how to use it.  That action uses JSON-P technology to cross domain (work around “The Same Origin Policy“).  The limitation is that, the remote server need to provide the JSON-P API, which is not so common.  You will have to implement the JSONP API if you could not find one on the internet.

That’s why we introduce the new “Get Remote Content” action.  It actually uses YQL proxy to retrieve data from remote sever, and it doesn’t require the remote server to support JSONP API.  So this action could be used in much more scenarios.  The only limitation is that, it relays on YQL proxy server provided by Yahoo, so it could not work if YQL proxy is down.

New “Page Scrolled” and “Content Scrolled” Events

Now it is possible to define behavior for scrolling events.  “Page Scrolled” is a new event for page, which will be triggered when the page is scrolled.  “Content Scrolled” is a new event for the ScrollableContainer element, which will be triggered when the content of the ScrollableContainer is scrolled.

If you wish to know how many pixels are actually scrolled, you could get the “scrollLeft” and “scrollTop”values in the CURRENT_EVENT system property.

The CURRENT_EVENT a new system property, which is an object type property, and represents the current event that being handled.  This property may give you some useful information about the current processing event.  For example, the “scrollLeft” and “scrollTop” values means the number of pixels that actually scrolled horizontally and vertically.

Fixed Bugs

  • Bug_0432: If table is wider than its preferred size, each editing will reduce its actual width.
  • Bug_0433: The toolbar for table editor may not be display if the table is close to the top border.
  • Bug_0434: Open plot that has page behavior, with behavior filter turned on, the page behavior is not listed by default.
  • Bug_0435: Behavior entities may be hidden, after adding event or action in behavior editor.