All posts in Update

Hello everyone, today we just released ForeUI V1.75!   This update includes some small enhancements, and a very useful tool: Element Selector.

Handy Element Selector

When we are prototyping a very big design, we may meet difficulty when trying to pick a small element that covered by a lot of elements.  In V1.37 we provided a slider for hiding some elements that on top of the target elements, but when you are facing a huge number of elements on the plot, the slider may not be sufficient since you don’t know where to stop dragging the slider.  In this new version, we provide a very useful tool to help picking elements in plot.

You can open this tool by clicking the  button above of the plot editing are.  It will list all elements of the current page and group them by their types, like this:

Each item has a check box so that you can check / uncheck it to select / deselect element.  What’s more, you can filter the content of the tree structure by inputing a keyword at the bottom, the elements will be listed only when their ids or notes content the keyword (case insensitive), thus you can find your desired element very quickly.  The animation below shows the way to work with the new element selector:

This feature is requested by Ulrich, thanks for suggesting this useful feature!

Change Image More Easily

The image (or say image box) element is very frequently used, yet changing the image is not so easy in previous versions:  you need to click the  button on the “Image” row in floating tool pane.  Now we’ve made an improvement: just double-click the image element and the popup menu will show up and allow you to select the image from image dock, existed icon library or external files.

The animation below shows the details:

Some Enhancements:

• Save image export settings in configure file.
• Avoid launching multiple instances of application (Windows).

Fixed Bug:

•  Bug_0110: Can not turn off Auto Resizing behavior for elements in group.

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.

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.

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.

Hello everyone, here’s a good news: ForeUI V1.60 is just released!  This version is relatively big update, we’ve added more elements, events and actions, and some important enhancements are included.

iFrame and Web Browser Elements

Now we’ve provided the iFrame element to ease the web prototyping.  After you drag iFrame to the plot, you can double-click it to change its default URL.

And the figure below shows the  simulation:

What’s more, you can change the URL of the iFrame during the simulation, via the “Set iFrame Source URL” action:

We also provide a new customized element to simulate the web browser, it allow you to input any url in the address bar and show the web content in it:

Add Note on Pages

From now on ForeUI allow you to add note on page, the note for the page can briefly introduce the page, which is very useful.

And the page note will be converted to footnote when exporting the pages to PDF:

New “Element Hidden” and “Window Closed” Events

These two new events actually work in the same way, yet the “Window Closed” event is for Window element only and the “Element Hidden” event is available for all other elements.  The event will be fired when element is  hidden (by the action).

More Actions to Control Text Box Element

In V1.60 we added 4 new actions for controling the text box in simulation, they are “Change Size”, “Change Opacity”, “Change Background Color” and “Change Text Color”.  These new actions provide more flexibility to implement many many special effect, that depends on your imagination 🙂

Improved Master Page

The old implementation of master page has a limitation, but now this limitation is eliminated.  The diagrame below shows the difference:

Other Enhancements:

• TextEditBox element does not paint the caret by default.
• Smarter id allocation.
• Show page title in the browser status bar.
• Allow turn on/off the z value auto adjustment when overlapping elements.

Fixed Bugs:

• Bug_0093: The actions on page level is not updated when involved element id is changed.
• Bug_0094: The element id “A_B_C” is regarded as “A_B” when trying to edit the id.
• Bug_0095: Javascript exception when click on Table, List, Tree, Menu or Tabs element that has no “Selection Changed” event handler.
• Bug_0096: Copy & paste multiple elements, the element id in actions are not mapped correctly.
• Bug_0097: “Page Loaded” event handler is invoked twice.
• Bug_0098: The master page background is not updated immediately when switching the UI theme.