A Few Ideas

Hi Peter,

I've been using WireframeSketcher for a little over a year now. I'm getting a lot of use out of it right now, thanks for your continued improvements. It has all the functionality I need to make mock-ups for UI spec documents.

I'm not looking for amazing new features, but I've been having some thoughts about what would make things easier for me. You may take them as suggestions if you feel my usage is typical.

• 1) Graphical items don't always line up. I like using the grid so I don't have to think about pixel-matching my lines and elements. But when the elements don't draw on the grid, it doesn't help me. A few examples:

• Rectangles draw on their top-left edge, but bottom-right is minus 1 pixel.

• Horizontal and Vertical Lines draw below or to the right of their top or left edge by 1 pixel.

• Checkboxes draw their text one pixel higher than labels and Text Fields.

• 2) I often use Lock to select objects within a window without accidentally dragging the window object. Sometimes I want to lock objects that are in the front of objects I'd like to modify, but because locked objects are selectable, this doesn't work for me. I'd really like a lock that makes objects unselectable. Adobe Illustrator has this function; to unlock objects you must Unlock All, since there's no way to unlock individual items.

• 3) The Arrow widget isn't useful to me because it only goes diagonally. I would love an arrow that would let me choose the direction, and fill color separately from outline color. Once I had that, I'd probably want arrowhead size controls too, sorry.

• 4) Copy as image. I paste my mock-ups into a word processing document that I annotate. Currently I use a screenshot program (MWSnap) to grab an image from my mock-up, but letting Copy put an image on the clipboard would simplify the process.

Thanks again,

Ult

Hi Ult,

Thank you for your feedback. My answers are below.

1. For your first point I'll see what I can do but some of those might not be fixable. Looks like fixing some of those will break existing mockups.

2. Does Adobe Illustrator also have a lock where you can select widgets? I am hesitant to do switch the behavior at this point but I am interested to see whether two lock variations can coexist.

3. The Arrow widget can be manipulated from properties view. You can choose a different diagonal and also toggle arrow heads. Did you see that? I know that ideally Arrow widget would be manipulated using two endpoints and not as a rectangle. This is on my to do list.

4. "Export to Image..." dialog offers a "Save to clipboard" option. Could you try that? Are you looking for a direct shortcut that lets you put the image to clipboard?