So, here’s a bit of irony. Development has said it “would be quicker to actually build this feature than prototype it first ..” … and it’s true, based on the complexity of what we want to validate.
In simple terms, we are redesigning our drawing tools. one of them draws a linear measurement. So, there’s an edit mode (for moving the line, and making it longer by dragging a control point, etc), and a “locked” mode where you need to double-click the line to put it into edit mode (where the hot spots will appear, and you can modify the line) ..
My first question, before I try to discover if the rest is possible, is can we simulate drawing a line in ForeUI, as follows:
Mouse down – start creating line
Mouse drag, draw line, anchored at starting point
mouse down- stop drawing line
i would then need to simulate the other behaviours like double clicking to display selectable areas, and specific behaviours such as make line longer by dragging end point, but move line by clicking/dragging mid point ..
basically, we’re trying to mimic something similar to the Open Office draw tools, but we have very specific behaviour that we need to validate before dedicating valuable development time, only to find out we got it wrong 😉
Thanks for any input
4 answers
Hi Jeremy,
As I mentioned in some old threads, we have put the “Free Hand” element into the pipeline. I think it is just what you need 🙂
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Ulrich Bottger_
⋅ May 10, 2010
Will the "Free hand" work in simulation or is it for designing the prototype only ?
The “Free Hand” element will be for prototype designing, which allows you to add any shape you need into your prototype. The shape will be converted to image in simulation.
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Ok, I think Jeremy Kerr is looking for something that works in simulation. Please correct me if I'm wrong, Jeremy :)
Hi guys,
Yes, Ulrich, my question was in regards to having that feature in simulation.
But, don’t get me wrong, I certainly don’t expect “any” prototyping software to be able to handle this. And, in fact, even after writing this, I realized that it would only be useful in a small context, and even then, I imagine that the technical challenges of even allowing this functionality would put too many limitations on being able to customize it .. so, you can remove this as a feature request 😉
In the end, as promised, our development team turned around a working prototype directly in-code, and we used that for validation instead.
I bet that I could have come close with the existing feature set in ForeUI (probably by adding a huge number of short, dashed lines, setting them all to hidden, and then use the magic of the global mouse-down event to display those dashed lines on mouse drag, based on X position, and then rotate and shift the lines based on the mouse offset from the origin.)
but, that would have taken about a month, and it probably wouldn’t behave the way i want, so, i’m glad we were able to work it out in-code .. (would have been a fun project though)
in no way do i see this as a short-fall of ForeUI … in hind-sight, my request is pretty rediculous .. so, feel free to ignore it ..
ok, this is the sound of me shutting up 😉
This question is now closed