RTL support

I posted about it in the past and I'm still looking forward for that so I wonder whether any improvements were made to support it since my my last post?

I've checked so many products and no one comes close to this one and I'm speaking about products that their price is few times the price of this one, this one just nails it!

An open source, community edition could haven been great to improve this product. :)

Hi Eyal,

There were no progress on RTL support. It's a still very low priority feature on our list and there wasn't much demand for it since your post. I also did some limited research to see how this is handled in other software. Unfortunately I couldn't find much, even in more expensive tools you are talking about. Perhaps you can point me to a tool that implements this?

Personally I would love to do something about this problem. Could we try to identify a list of small incremental steps that could be performed to improve on this?

Well, I can certainly use the product again and tell you were and what you can do to improve it, will it help?

Yes, this would help, although I was hoping that you are an user already. Also it would be great if you could point to some other software that does it well and we can get an inspiration from.

I'm thinking that the best approach would be editing the specific controls in Photoshop and show you how it should look like so you will get the idea.

Some of the built-in controls are working great in RTL like the button and the table because I can just align the text to the right but in some controls like the ones listed below this isn't feasible or sufficient because the controls themselves needs to change to the right, basically you need to rotate them by 180 degrees and flip it vertically (without the text) and the controls will be RTL controls, then finally, adding the alignment of the text.

• List
• Tree
• Accordion
• Window
• Group
• Combo
• Checkbox
• Checkbox Group
• Radio Button
• Radio Group
• Popup
• Search Field

P.s. I really want to buy it and I don't have any problems doing so but I need to know whether this is a work in progress and whether over time I will see the expected RTL support.

I'm a software developer which brings me to another important question, I know the program is built on top of Eclipse is there any (informal or formal) extension points and support for plugins that 3rd party developers can use to extend this behaviour? then I could build everything myself and I'll definitely buy the program. :)

Well, the easiest way to get the idea or/and look and feel of RTL controls will be to open a WinForms project in Visual Studio or any other IDE which comes with a designer and play with the controls there.

Eyal, thanks for detailing it. I think there is no need for Photoshop, I get that all controls should be basically mirrored horizontally. I know about Visual Studio, but I was hoping to see an example from a diagramming tool like Visio or similar.

I am actually looking into adding some extensibility, but not at Java API level. I am not sure if you are aware of it, but WireframeSketcher supports SVG images which you could use to create a mirrored version for some of the above controls. These SVG-based control won't work exactly as mirrored controls, but at least they will look like ones. See more details about this here: http://wireframesketcher.com/help/help.html#working_with_screens/working_with_svg_images

I am looking into extending SVG images into something more dynamic and to allow to use them to change the appearance of existing controls. I think this could solve at least partly the problem with RTL support.

Could you give SVGs a try and let me know if they could work for you?

Yeah I guess I can try that.

Forgot to mention but I'm using Enterprise Architect!

Admittedly, it's not as easy as building the UI drafts in WireframeSketcher as the software was built mainly for creating software models but the UI diagrams gets the job done and the controls there fully support RTL. :)

I tried using SVG files but don't have the time to do that as this is something I do on my free time so I can't afford to spend the required amount of time to edit images, not to mention that I'm not much of a designer and I feel more comfortable inside an IDE than I do with an image editor so I decided to use English and hoping that at some point you will add it or/and add extensibility so developers will have the ability to add/change the default behaviour of the controls.

Thank you for the great support and commitment to your customers.

I'll purchase the software in few days. :)