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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Archive for November, 2009

November 3, 2009

Use Hotkeys to Accelerate Your Work

by Xavier

ForeUI is designed to be a desktop application and we can manipulate it with mouse only, however someone (including me) would like to make use of the keyboard with another hand, so I decide to make a table of all available hotkeys in ForeUI.

It took me about 20 minutes to create the first draft, here it is:

Hotkey	Effective Region	Description	Comment
Ctrl + N	Main Window	Create a new ForeUI plot file and open it.	CMD + N in Mac
Ctrl + O	Main Window	Browse an existed ForeUI plot file to open.	CMD + O in Mac
Ctrl + S	Main Window	Save the current editing plot file.	CMD + S in Mac
Ctrl + W	Main Window	Launch slide show.	CMD + W in Mac
Ctrl + R	Main Window	Run simulation in your default web browser.	CMD + R in Mac
Ctrl + Z	Main Window	Undo the last editing action.	CMD + Z in Mac
Ctrl + Y	Main Window	Redo the last undo action.	CMD + Y in Mac
Ctrl + X	Main Window, Text Editor, Behavior Editor	Cut the selected content.	CMD + X in Mac
Ctrl + C	Main Window, Text Editor, Behavior Editor	Copy the selected content.	CMD + C in Mac
Ctrl + V	Main Window, Text Editor, Behavior Editor	Paste the selected content.	CMD + V in Mac
Delete	Main Window, Text Editor, Behavior Editor	Remove the selected content.	Backspace in Mac
Ctrl + D	Main Window	Open behavior editor for selected element or current page.	CMD + D in Mac
Ctrl + Right	Main Window	Select next element in plot.	CMD + Right in Mac
Ctrl + Left	Main Window	Select previous element in plot.	CMD + Left in Mac
Ctrl + A	Main Window	Select all elements in plot.	CMD + A in Mac
Page Down	Main Window, Simulation in Browser	Switch to next page.	Fn + Down in Mac
Page Up	Main Window, Simulation in Browser	Switch to previous page.	Fn + Up in Mac
Left, Right, Up, Down	Plot Editing Area	Move the selected elements in plot.
Hold Shift + Single Click	Plot Editing Area	Add element to current selection.
Hold Ctrl + Single Click	Plot Editing Area	Remove element from current selection.
Hold Shift + Drag & Drop	Selection Border	Resize selected elements, with aspect ratio locked.
Right Click	Plot Editing Area, Behavior Editor	Show context menu.
Enter	All windows that have “ok” button	Emulate pressing the ok button.
Escape	All windows that have “cancel” button	Emulate pressing the cancel button.

I think I haven’t miss anthing but I may be wrong, so please help me to double check it, thanks in advance 😉

November 1, 2009

ForeUI V1.72: Pie Chart and Some Enhancements

by Xavier

Hi everybody, today I am grad to announce that ForeUI V1.72 is released! In this update we bring you:

Pie Chart

We’ve provided Line Chart in V1.65 and Bar Chart in V1.70, and we’ve got some great feedback. In V1.72 we add one more chart element: Pie Chart. Pie chart is very useful to represent the ratio data. As usual, you can click the “Shuffle” button to generate the random data for Pie Chart element:

Specify Default Font

The default font of text element (text box, button, list, table, tree etc.) is displayed as “<default>”, its actual font name will be “Arial” in most cases, but if you are using the hand drawing UI theme, the default font name will be “Comic Sans MS” instead.

Now you can specify the default font for all text elements, you can find the new option here:

In the majority of cases, you don’t need to change the default font. You may need this feature if you want to display Asian fonts (Chinese, Japanese etc), since the “Arial” and “Comic Sans MS” fonts can not display correctly in these languages.

Set Exact Opacity Value

This enhancement is requested by Michael Matti, now we have two controls to change the opacity of element, and they are linked together, you can use the slider to choose the approximate value, and use the stepper to set the exact value. This will be helpful if you want to make two or more elements have the same opacity value.

Fill_Opacity

Auto Resizing On/Off

The “Auto Resizing” feature existed from the first version of ForeUI, it will be activated once you finish editing the text content of element. More specifically, it will enlarge the element to make sure the element can contain the new text content. It makes the tool more smart but in some cases it may be annoying, so here we have the option to turn on/off this feature:

Post-It Text Default Alignment

Different than the Balloon element, Post-It element is more likely to be used to contain a paragraph of text, so it is better to be left-aligned by default. This enhancement is suggested by Michael Matti.

Fixed Bugs:

Bug_0106: Post-It element has no content margins.
Bug_0107: Switch branching with numeric cases does not work in FF/Chrome.
Bug_0108: The default font of text element changed in simulation.
Bug_0109: Once select the font for element, can not change it back to <default> font.

Feature | ForeUI | Uncategorized | Update