Archive for October, 2009

After two weeks development, we can proudly deliver ForeUI V1.70 today!  As I mentioned, we will provide more and more web stuffs in ForeUI, so this time we bring a new Bar Chart element.  We’ve planed improving the behavior editor for a long time, and we’ve made it in this update.

Bar Chart Element

It is a new chart element that similar with the line chart, but it render the data with multiple bars.  You can edit its data by double-clicking the chart, each row of the data represent a bar, it is formated as “Color: value”.  You can specify the chart direction freely. Like the line chart, you can also generate random data for it with just one click away, the GIF animation below shows the details:

Switch Branching

Before V1.70, you may have to use several nested conditional branchings to check a value, but now with the switch branching, you can make your flow chart much more simpler.  Switch branching allow you to specify an expression and you can define as many cases as you need.

Enhanced Behavior Editor

Now the behavior editor is much more easier to use, you can drag and drop nodes within the behavior tree.   The GIF animation below  shows the details:

What’s more, we’ve implemented the context menu for behavior editor,  the cut/copy/paste commands are available in the context menu:

Avoid Moving Element by Mistake

This enhancement is requested by Ulrich, if your machine is fast enough, you may move the element by mistake when you just want to select it.  We make a simple machanism to avoid this: just ignore the mouse dragging for a while after performing the selection.  The element will “stick” on its location for a short while, thus you will not move it by mistake, the two videos below shows the difference:

Before V1.70

V1.70 and above

Other Enhancements:

• Press Shift to lock aspect ratio when resizing
• Some new hotkeys:
  • ESC to close the text editor
  • ESC to close page manage window
  • Ctrl+X (CMD+X in Mac) to cut node in behavior editor
  • Ctrl+C (CMD+C in Mac) to copy node in behavior editor
  • Ctrl+V (CMD+V in Mac) to paste node in behavior editor

Fixed Bugs:

Bug_0101: The background of element chooser should be fully filled with plot’s background color
Bug_0102: Some buttons in text editor are hidden when using Windows’ native look and feel.
Bug_0103: Item with spaces in MenuBar element is not highlighted correctly.
Bug_0104: Element default font should be the same with the tool’s default font.
Bug_0105: Group members’ z values are ignored in simulation.

I am proud to announce that ForeUI V1.65 is released today!   We are planning to provide more and more web stuff in ForeUI, this new version contains a new line chart element that is useful for web app prototyping.  Here’s the overview of this update:

Line Chart Element

The new Line Chart element provides a intuitive view of data.   It can render multiple lines in a chart.  You can double-click the element to edit the data, the chart data looks like this:

Each row is for a single line, it is formated as “Color: x1,y1; x2,y2; x3,y3; ……“.  We know specifying the chart data is not so interesting if you just need a chart to show, so we provide the Shuffle command to generate random data for the chart, just input the line number and press “Shuffle” button, all data is regenerated randomly, that’s fancy 😉

New Hotkeys

We implemented some new hotkeys in this version:

Options for Exported Image File Name

In this version, we provide new options to specify the export image file name.  This feature is requested by Michael Matti, by using the title of the page in the file name, we can easily find out the image we want.  The options are available in the file chooser dialog when trying to export image files:

If you choose the second option, the image file name will include the title of the page (all non-alphanumeric characters are replaced with “_”).

Scroll Options for IFrame

In V1.60 we introduced the IFrame element, now we provide the scroll options for it.  These options allow you to define the scrolling strategy of iframe:

Show Page Title

 This feature is requested by Ulrich Bottger,  now the page title will be displayed on the bottom-left corner of the tool, and you don’t have to open the page management window to get this information.

Folders Moved

When running ForeUI in VISTA with non-administrator account, you may meet the privilege problem when trying to output something.  In this version, we moved the output folders (workspace, plot and customize folders) to the system preferred user directory, it will avoid that problem.

Other Enhancements:

• Text edit box has no text content by default.
• Change the minimum size of image element to 5×5.

Fixed Bugs:

• Bug_0099: TextEditBox element lists some actions that are not implemented yet.
• Bug_0100: IFrame element should have thicker border in hand drawing theme.