[REQ] and additional Feedback

Hi Petru,

it's very easy to use WS to create simple screens and storyboards. We thought about buying licenses for our developers, because we haven't seen a comparable product integrating so well to our daily work. I like the integration within eclipse and the automatically reading of image resources from a project.

Here are some issues and requests i found during working with WS:

• some icons should be overworked, because they do not have a white background, e.g. the mouse cursor hands could not be placed on a window close button.
• exporting to different formats especially from the storyboard would be very helpful. I would mostly prefer MS Word or OpenOffice to make further work on it (CI for example)
• A default widget for notes would be helpful. Something like a yellow speech ballon what stand out from the designed screen.
• More widgets :-) (we also had an eye on iplotz, which has a bigger pool of widgets. perhaps you can get some ideas from that.)
• It could be also very helpful to create links between screens in the storyboard to make an more interactive presentations, e.g. having a screen whith to tabs. each tab will be linked to a defined screen, so i can click thru the storyboard like i will and not in an ordered way. it's much easier for customers to understand prototypes like this.

Keep up the good work, we look forward to the next releases.

Timo

Hi Timo,

Thank you for taking your time to give me your feedback.

some icons should be overworked, because they do not have a white background, e.g. the mouse cursor hands could not be placed on a window close button.

It's noted. I'll add white background for mouse cursor icon.

exporting to different formats especially from the storyboard would be very helpful. I would mostly prefer MS Word or OpenOffice to make further work on it (CI for example)

How do you see the exported document? Should it be a screen per page kind of thing?

A default widget for notes would be helpful. Something like a yellow speech ballon what stand out from the designed screen.

More widgets :-) (we also had an eye on iplotz, which has a bigger pool of widgets. perhaps you can get some ideas from that.)

Adding more widgets is my focus for the releases that will follow. I've hesitated to add more widgets so far because I need to do some technical changes first to make things more manageable.

It could be also very helpful to create links between screens in the storyboard to make an more interactive presentations

I have the linking feature on my list but it's still in planning stages. So far I see two possible approaches:

1. Add linking support to storyboards. Links would be created using drag&drop. This means that the linking information is not stored at the screen level.
2. Add a link property to certain widgets and allow to select a screen to link to. Perhaps it should only be possible to link to screens in the same project. The linking information is stored in each screen.

Both approaches have their pluses and minuses. The first one looks cleaner but could be harder to implement. It also could be harder to understand.

First to the linking feature. I would prefer the 2nd approach. Working with screens within one project is absolutly OK. It's senseless to use links to other projects in my eyes. Mainly linking widgets to other screens makes different ways thru the screens possible. The audience could decide which way to go. The 1st approach sounds more like "bringing the screens in a different order" (which i can do now). And the 2nd approach also has a big plus for exports. Perhaps you could simply export the screens as images to html pages. Each screen to a single page. Then you can use the link informations to put a imagemap to each page and link to other pages.

Exporting the storyboard to PowerPoint could also be helpful. Isn't there an easy xml-version for powerpoint also?

BTW: will you support language files in the feature? i could help you translating it to german.

Yes, I also think the second approach is more sensible.

I am adding PowerPoint export to the list of requested features. I think the POI java library is able to create PowerPoint files so this shouldn't be an issue.

Adding support for language files shouldn't be hard but I am concerned about the maintenance. As it is now I cannot afford doing and maintaining the translation. Perhaps I'll be able to find some arrangement in the future.

Some more issues, we have found during trying.

• selecting icons from within the project could be very strange. we have projects with hundreds of icons, sometimes named equal in different icons. you should group the list by folder structure, otherwise the user must search a lot.
• same for adding screens to a storyboard. we will make different storyboards within a project and grouped the screens by folders. within each folders the screens are named 01... to 99... which makes it also complex to add screens from a list of hundreds.
• every widget should have color as default property. especially buttons should have colors or a feature to display them disabled or as preferred button in a list of buttons
• another request: grouped objects should be reused as widgets. e.g. having a "custom" widget panel to drag grouped widgets to. then i can use them again in other screens.

ok, some more from my collegue :-)

• the app should story the selected palette settings. if i collapsed all palettes and reopen a screen, all palettes are open again. btw, the palettes works sometimes currious?
• copy/paste a item from one screen to another, won't paste on the same position. this would make it much easier.
• the Lorem Ipsum widget is editable. it would be cool, if the lorem ipsum text stays directly behind the edited text. for plane text, i can use "Text".
• In web applications, you can have dropdown with multiple selection. Currently i can use the "List" widget to do this, but i can only select on item as highlighted in the widget.

Now i will go immediatelly to the online store and get two licenses :-)

• selecting icons from within the project could be very strange. we have projects with hundreds of icons, sometimes named equal in different icons. you should group the list by folder structure, otherwise the user must search a lot.

• same for adding screens to a storyboard. we will make different storyboards within a project and grouped the screens by folders. within each folders the screens are named 01... to 99... which makes it also complex to add screens from a list of hundreds.

Timo, you can also drag&drop image and screens files directly from Project Explorer view. It's something I've recently documented in the User Guide. Can you try it and tell me how it works for you?

• every widget should have color as default property. especially buttons should have colors or a feature to display them disabled or as preferred button in a list of buttons

I am planning to add a state property to widgets that should support it. For example button widget will have states like default, focused and disabled. This should avoid the need for colors.

• another request: grouped objects should be reused as widgets. e.g. having a "custom" widget panel to drag grouped widgets to. then i can use them again in other screens.

Timo, have you tried master screens? You can design reusable chunks and put them in their own screen files. You could create a special folder that holds these reusable pieces. The advantage here is that you can change these master components in a single place and the changes will be propagated automatically.

Another solution is to create a file named Palette.screen and put all the reusable elements in there and then use copy&paste. It's not like a true palette but it could work.

Timo,

Thanks for becoming a customer! I hope you won't be disappointed.

• the app should story the selected palette settings. if i collapsed all palettes and reopen a screen, all palettes are open again. btw, the palettes works sometimes currious?

I'll see what I can do. I've also noticed this issue. The Palette View is a generic Eclipse view so I'll have to hack something out to fix this.

• copy/paste a item from one screen to another, won't paste on the same position. this would make it much easier.

It's a good idea. I think I should be able to detect when a widget is pasted across different screens.

• the Lorem Ipsum widget is editable. it would be cool, if the lorem ipsum text stays directly behind the edited text. for plane text, i can use "Text".

I'll see what I can do. My main reason for hiding the Lorem Ipsum text was that I didn't want to put the text into the XML file. Perhaps I should allow the text to be edited and then detect whether the text has changed and only then put it into the XML.

• In web applications, you can have dropdown with multiple selection. Currently i can use the "List" widget to do this, but i can only select on item as highlighted in the widget.

This is something already on my list. I'm thinking to add a special syntax that will be used to mark an item as selected directly in the text. For example something like "|" (pipe) character put in front of the item. This is part of another big feature that I am planning - generalized wiki-like syntax support.

Hi Timo,

Just wanted to let you know that I've just introduced linking to support interactive prototypes. You can test prototypes in full-screen mode and export them to clickable PDF. The full blog post is here:

http://wireframesketcher.com/blog/2010-09-27-linking-and-interactive-prototypes.html

Please let me know how it works for you!