Now ForeUI have its own website! Although ForeUI is not offically launched yet, we think it is better to have an offical site first.
Also we open our support forum in getsatisfaction.com, you can also access it via the “Support” button on the top-right corner of the website. We like the platform provided by getsatisfaction.com, which allow us to provide our support openly, and can help more people with less effort. 😉
Here is a good news: ForeUI alpha version is released! This version of ForeUI has most features in our list, you can make mockup, save it to .4ui file (zip format actually, just change the name), export it to png image…
There is still a key feature missing: theme switching. Let me explain what it is, the default theme is wireframe (as you can see now), we will provide Windows theme, Mac theme and Java theme latter. We can design the mockup with any theme, and we can change the theme at any time. That means we can preview the UI effect on Window, Mac OS or Java for the same UI design!
The alpha version can be download from the links below. If you are using Windows and you are not sure if you have JRE5+ installed, please download the Windows Installer, it will take care everything and make sure you can launch the software. If you download the minimal package, you need to install JRE by yourself.
Enjoy it! Please don't forget to give me your feedback;)
After about one week’s hard work, without saying anything, we make a big progress on ForeUI, now the framework is about to finish, we are working on all kinds of components.
Here is a screen shot of ForeUI, for us it is usable now but we still want to make it better before packing it. We hope to provide a demo (may be via webstart) next time.
Finally we decide to use zip format, the zip file will pack the xml and images data inside.
XML is a good format to represent such a plot, but it use more disk space and lack the ability to store the binary files (like icon images etc.) So a zip package that pack all these together will be good.
It is easy to extract the zip file and check what’s inside 😉
Actually we planed to support JRE6+ only, but so far Mac OS X has JRE5 only (it is said to have JRE6 soon, but who knows) , so we changed the plan.
I just check the source code, fortunately most code are compatible with JRE5, but the performance goes down a lot, I heared that JRE6 provides a lot of optimize in runtime, and now I believe it is true. Anyway, we will optimize the code to improve the performance, we hope ForeUI could work well in both JRE5 and JRE6.
