Right to Left support

Hello,

I'd like to purchase WireframeSketcher but my only problem is that it lacks support for Right to Left, is there a possibility to add it?

Regards,

Eyal Shilony

Hi Eyal,

Can you give me more specifics about what are you looking for? Recently we did some improvements to better support right to left languages. Are you looking for more than that?

Well, for example you can't align the text of the Accordion to the right and when it comes to Group or Window you can't change the direction of the title to the right.

Eyal,

I looked more into it. Currently WireframeSketcher also can run in RTL mode where all widgets are mirrored. Would this be helpful to you? Or do you need to be able to mix RTL and non-RTL widgets?

Yup, I need to mix them. :)

We finally chose to go with Axsure although I really like this one for sketching so I'll definitely buy it when this feature is going to possible. :)

I ditched the idea of buying Axure and chose this because I'm more of a programmer than a designer yet I still need Right to Left support so I hope you're going to add it at some point.

Another required thing that I think this program is missing is orientation support, are you planning to add this?

Hi Eyal,

I hope WireframeSketcher will serve you well.

What do you mean exactly by orientation support?

Well, by orientation I mean the ability to rotate the widgets and text as well as flipping sides.

This will inherently solve the problem of adding specific case to support Right to Left.

I'll be honest with you, I really like your product and I think you did a very good job with it but I really expected it to have this kind of functionality.

I'm not sure what are the limitations and why it wasn't part of the design of the application but it's quite important for a sketching tool.

I've tried many applications for sketching as well as Balsamiq which I'm using now because it does support Right to Left but something always takes me back to WireframeSketcher, I just wish that it was more polished and had some of the features Balsamiq Mockups has.

If you wish I can probably list some of the features that in my opinion will make this tool a lot more usable.

Eyal,

Label widget can be rotated to get vertical text if this is what you are looking for.

I am not aware of RTL support in Balsamiq but it would help me if you could give me some examples. The biggest problem with adding proper RTL is our lack of expertise in this area. So we appreciate any help (with specific examples) you can give us to guide our efforts.

Any suggestions are welcome and if you think there are things that can be improved then please let us know.

You don't get support for every widget by default in Balsamiq but a lot of custom widgets were made and some of them support RTL out of the box.

I know I can create components in WireframeSketcher too and when I tried to create the layout as a component and some other custom RTL components the experience was not good enough for me to continue because it ended up to as a mess.

To be frank, as a software engineer I don't think that you need any expertise in the area because I'm not asking for a system that can read Hebrew in which you may need knowledge in linguistics, I'm merely asking orientation support which the only expertise required here is knowledge in mathematics, specifically geometry to be able to rotate and reflect (flip) sides of an element.

I'm not trying to get into your shoes because I don't know the whole picture but I definitely know the subject well enough and what's required to design such a feature.

If you don't plan to support it because it's either too complex or expensive at this stage of development I'll understand.

Can't you just add the same widgets with a different direction?

Few features that I think will make this product more usable.

• Orientation support or at least some RTL support that was discussed so far.
• Some of the advanced widgets in Balsamiq have more features like the Cover Flow, you can really choose an image you don't have to drag anything or make it fit.
• Importing from bmml files, this will allow people to convert their work to WireframeSketcher as well as reusing components
• Exporting to XMI this can be really useful to software architects.

Personally the first two points are most important because it's pretty easy for me to deal with the other two.

I'm sorry if it sounds harsh but I just know that it can be a lot better.

Just to clarify on few things,

I mistakenly wrote direction here "Can't you just add the same widgets with a different direction?" when I was referring to orientation.

In this sentence "Orientation support or at least some RTL support that was discussed so far." RTL refers to the direction of the text whereas orientation refers to the ability to rotate the element and flip sides.

Obviously both features are desirable but for now either one of them can help me out.

Eyal,

Sorry for my late reply. Your message got lost in spam folder and I found it just now.

I guess I am mixing things up a little. For me proper support for RTL also means correct right to left arrangement of Hebrew and Arabic text. I had a discussion recently with another user and he was complaining that Hebrew text with punctuation is not displayed quite right. I thought that maybe you are experiencing this problem too.

If you are looking just for a possibility to mirror existing components then you are right, it shouldn't be such a difficult task.

There is also another option and I don't know if you tried it. On a system with Hebrew or Arabic language the application should run in mirrored (RTL) mode (unless you changed your system settings). In this mode everything is mirrored and components too. You can also force this mode in WireframeSketcher by running it like this: sketcher -dir rtl

Could this be a possible solution for you?

Thank you very much! yes it does solve part of the problem even though I need to use English and Hebrew because the application I'm about to design and implement needs both.

I haven't seen such support for RTL yet which I must say I'm quite impressed.

Is there any ETA for orientation support? can you comment on the other features I wished it had?

P.s. when I will have more time I'll probably write a tool for porting it to XMI.

After using the -dir rtl option for few days it wasn't that good simply because it changes the UI to RTL when everything is written in English.

It was great option if the UI was staying put in its English form and only the widgets were changing to RTL.

Eyal,

I don't have an ETA for RTL right now. There is not a lot of demand for it so it's a low priority. I suspect that it's also technically challenging feature, but I'll schedule some time to research exactly what the implementation would involve.

Some of the advanced widgets in Balsamiq have more features like the Cover Flow, you can really choose an image you don't have to drag anything or make it fit.

I'll consider adding image property to CoverFlow widget. Let me know if there other things you'd like to see.

Importing from bmml files, this will allow people to convert their work to WireframeSketcher as well as reusing components

I'd like to see some support from the community for this. WireframeSketcher provides a nice Java API for working with it's model so writing such a tool should be possible. The complicated part is reading and interpreting Balsamiq files.

Exporting to XMI this can be really useful to software architects.

I am not sure how this would work, but again you can use our APIs to make it easier to create such a tool. Find more details here: http://wireframesketcher.com/developers.html

Thank you!

I'll check it out again once RTL is going to be supported, I'll wait for it. :)