Hi guys,
We’re starting to look at ways we can adopt ForeUI into the majority of our design pipeline.
One thought that came up, was that it would be great if we could use this tool to replace our 1st phase Powerpoint presentations.
As many others do, we’ll start of our designs with very rough concept designs, and then build Powerpoint presentations to annotate every screen and provide details of what the interaction will/should look like.
It would be really cool if we could do all of that in ForeUI, because then we could then quickly add interaction to our mockups from the same tool, and avoid needless duplication.
The only thing stopping us is that the annotation tools are still pretty rudimentary. We don’t need much, but what would be nice would be:
– FlowChart-style graphics
– Easy-to-use and position connector lines (like OpenOffice Draw)
– Flexible arrow annotations (where you can start and end at any location, and control the curve, maybe with Photoshop-like control handles along the line?)
Our idea is to create an “Annotations” page for every interface page, so that we can distribute a marked-up copy for review, and then quickly hide those pages when we want to simulate our interactive mockup.
And, maybe you could even add something to the Page tool to make it easier to add an annotations layer like this. Right now, we’ll add a new page, and set the page below as it’s master .. but maybe this could be a specific case where the master-child relationship is automatic so, for example ..
1. Open the Page window.
2. Select the page you want to annotate
3. Click “Add Annotations”
A new annotation layer is added that automatically assigns the current page as it’s master.
4. Click the Annotations tool palette and start using all the new and improved annotation tools that I’ve suggested at the top of this thread 😉
That would be great. Would anyone else find benefits in using ForeUI to kick-start your conceptual designs and replace Powerpoint, or whatever other presentation tools you might be using?
Cheers,
-jeremy
3 answers
Hi Jeremy, thanks for the interesting suggestions. We will consider these when we improve the annotation part.
Before we release new offical elements for annotation, we’d like to provide the full flexibility to create shapes. So that users can create what they need freely. In our TODO list, we have planned the (Arbitrary) Polygon and Free Hand Shape elements for this purpose.
Is there some flow chat template existing? I found a fci extension library on your site but it doesn’t opens with my version of foreUI. Not sure how to make it work. Since this thread is a year old, did you guys have flow chart for the recent version. I did get around loading library in custom elements tab but I can’t paste this download in the folder where existing libraries are present for some reason. Thanks
Hi varun,
The custom element library you mention should be ok. If the library already exist in your harddisk, you can load that library directly.
Or you can download the library via the “Resource Sharing” button. Which will take care of everything and you will find a new “Flowchart” category on the left, after the download. 
This question is now closed