WireframeSketcher. The making of.

Adjustable scrollbars, new splitter and color picker widgets and more

Mar 16 2010 by Peter Severin

Hi there! I am happy to announce a new release of WireframeSketcher. This new version brings another round of improvements that I’m sure you’ll find useful. I dedicate this version to Laurent Malvert as the acknowledgment of his effort in improving this tool. Please read on.

Adjustable scrollbars

The main change in this version is a new Value property that lets you adjust the thumb position for scrollbar widgets. This property works for Horizontal and Vertical scrollbar widgets but also for all the widgets that have the Scrollbar property such as Table, Tree, Browser, Window and other:

Adjustable Scrollbars

Additionally the Value property also works for Slider and Progress Bar widgets:

Value Property

Splitters and Color Picker

This version also brings three new widgets. Vertical and Horizontal Splitters and the Color Picker:

New Splitter and Color Picker widgets

Other changes

Here is a list of other changes in this version:

Eclipse Helios

I am following closely the development of the next major version of Eclipse also known as Eclipse Helios (3.6). Those that live on the edge will be happy to know that WireframeSketcher works even better than before with this new version.

One notable change in Eclipse Helios was made just yesterday. It concerns a long standing issue on Mac OS X Cocoa which was rendering WireframeSketcher practically unusable. This issue is now fixed and the future is bright for Mac OS X users! You won’t be restricted to using Eclipse Carbon version anymore.

Updating

As usual to update to the latest version of WireframeSketcher just use the Eclipse update manager.

Enjoy!

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Nudge and duplicate actions, better button widget and more

Feb 24 2010 by Peter Severin

Hi there! I am happy to announce a new release of WireframeSketcher. This new version brings a new set of improvements meant to improve your productivity. Please read on.

Nudge actions

Nudge actions let you move widgets using only your keyboard. This is very useful when you need more precision. I’ve made a few changes so that widgets can now also be resized using keyboard shortcuts. To make this all work consistently existing shortcuts had to be modified slightly:

The logic is simple. Use Ctrl (or Command on Mac OS X) for nudge resize. Use Shift to nudge in increments of 20px.

There is also Alt key that you can use to reduce the increments to 1px and 10px respectively. However there is a slight problem with Alt+Ctrl combinations on Linux so lets say that it’s not an official shortcut for now.

Duplicate action

Duplicate action is something you can find in most graphical editors and WireframeSketcher now also has it. The shortcut for duplicate is Ctrl+D.

Duplicate works mostly like Copy&Paste. So instead of using Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V you can now simply press Ctrl+D.

However duplicate is a bit smarter than just a simple Copy and Paste. When you duplicate some widgets, move them and then duplicate them again, the duplicate action records the relative position of your first copy to the original and then positions the second copy relative to the first copy in the same way.

If it sounds complicated then try to quickly create a form like this. Create a label and a text. Select both and press Ctrl+D to duplicate them. Align this first copy vertically with the original. Press Ctrl+D and watch how the second copy is magically positioned exactly the way you want. Continue pressing Ctrl+D to create as many rows as you need:

Duplicate

Better Button widget

The Button widget saw some improvements in this version. First, buttons now have font properties. Additionally buttons can now be vertically resized.

Another change concerns button colors. Buttons are now smarter and will switch their foreground to white if the background is too dark:

Button Colors

Note in the above screenshot that icons are also rendered using the foreground color. This is something that now also works in other widgets like Label and Text.

Palette rearrangement

A took the risk to rearrange all palette entries. Now all widgets are sorted alphabetically. I think this should make locating a widget a much more easier task. Please let me know how you like this change.

Other changes

Updating

As usual to update to the latest version of WireframeSketcher just use the Eclipse update manager.

Enjoy!

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Improved resize, bigger icons and a lot more

Feb 03 2010 by Peter Severin

Hi there! I am happy to announce a new release of WireframeSketcher. Yet again it’s a bunch of small and not so small improvements that should make your time spent with WireframeSketcher more productive.

Improved resize

I’ve changed the way the resize of multiple widgets works. Now it’s much more natural. When resizing multiple widgets their positions and sizes are scaled proportionally.

Improved Resize

The best part is that you can now also resize grouped widgets. The resize will work exactly the same way there. I think this makes widget grouping a whole lot more useful.

Bigger icons

Icons now also come in 48×48 size. I think this will help you find more uses for the icon set:

Bigger Icons

Disabled text style

A new wiki style now lets you render a piece of text as disabled. This functionality was requested by Jonathan here. The most obvious place for it is in Menus and Popups but I am sure you’ll find other uses:

Disabled Style

To make a piece of text disabled just surround it with tilde(~) characters like this: ~Disabled Text~.

Actual widget size in XML

As of this version, two new attributes “measuredWidth” and “measuredHeight” are stored in the XML. Unlike “width” and “height” these attributes always contain the actual size of the widget, even if the widget is sized automatically.

Most definitely those of you that look into exploiting the XML format used by WireframeSketcher will find this additional information useful.

Other changes

Updating

As usual to update to the latest version of WireframeSketcher just use the Eclipse update manager.

Enjoy!

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Better paste, Yoxos integration and more

Jan 17 2010 by Peter Severin

Hi there! Happy new year everyone! I am happy to announce a new release of WireframeSketcher. This time it’s a bunch of small and not so small improvements that should make your life easier.

Better paste

First improvement is a better paste action. Now apart from being able to paste widgets you can also paste text, images and even the XML produced by the SWT Spy plugin.

Pasting some text is pretty straightforward. The pasted text ends up in a Text widget. Pasting an image is a little bit more involved. You’ll be asked for a location and a file name to save the image to:

Paste Image

If you are using SWT Spy you’ll be happy to know that now you can paste the captured XML directly into a screen editor. This makes the whole process much more flexible since you can paste multiple captures into the same screen.

Other improvements

Object Menu

Yoxos integration

I am happy to announce that WireframeSketcher is now part of the Yoxos catalog.

What is Yoxos? Yoxos is a free online service that lets you build your personal Eclipse distribution. You create a profile with your favorite plugins and Yoxos combines everything into a single download that you can extract and install on your machine.

I have frequent requests for a standalone version of WireframeSketcher. I think Yoxos provides nice and flexible solution to this. I’ve created a public Yoxos WireframeSketcher Profile that you can use a minimal Eclipse install with WireframeSketcher. The big plus is that you can customize this profile and add your own plugins from the catalog.

So if you are looking for a standalone version of WireframeSketcher then please give Yoxos a try. Take a look at updated installation instructions for more details.

Updating

As usual to update to the latest version of WireframeSketcher just use the Eclipse update manager.

Enjoy!

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Printing, Zoom and Pulse integration

Dec 18 2009 by Peter Severin

Hi there! I am happy to announce a new major release. As you can guess from the title this one is quite exciting. Please read on.

Improved printing support

As promised I worked hard on improving printing support. You can now print both wireframes and storyboards and get a high quality result on paper. Large wireframes are now scaled down to fit on a single page. WireframeSketcher will even choose for you portrait or landscape paper orientation. If you ever wanted to use WireframeSketcher for paper prototyping now is the time!

For best results I recommend that you use the latest stable version of Eclipse. This is especially important on Linux where printing simply won’t work with old versions.

Zoom

Zoom is another exciting addition in this release. You can now edit wireframes at a zoom level that suits you best.

Zoom actions are available in the toolbar:

Zoom toolbar

From the main menu:

View menu

And you can also use the following keyboard shortcuts:

Ctrl++ Zoom In
Ctrl+- Zoom Out
Ctrl+1 Actual Size
Ctrl+0 Zoom to Fit
Ctrl+MouseWheel Zoom In and Zoom Out

Pulse integration

Genuitec has just announced the release of Pulse 3.0. What is Pulse? Pulse is a product that helps you manage multiple installations of Eclipse-based IDEs. If you find yourself manually replicating the same Eclipse configuration on multiple machines then try Pulse. I think you’ll like it!

With Pulse 3.0 WireframeSketcher is now part of its catalog. This means that you can easily add WireframeSketcher to your profiles and have it installed automatically for you. Since MyEclipse integrates directly with Pulse, for MyEclipse users WireframeSketcher now is just a few clicks away.

Other small changes

Updating

As usual to update to the latest version of WireframeSketcher just use the Eclipse update manager.

Merry Christmas to you all!

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