Wireframes, Mockups, Prototypes – FlairBuilder

Hi there,

Coming up shortly after the exciting 1.6 release, here’s a new set of updates to your beloved wireframe/prototyping tool.

Label/Title/Paragraph resize

How often did you want to resize a portion of text such that it will wrap nicely on multiple lines? Well, now it’s possible and FlairBuilder will let you do just that offering you more options for text components.

Notice how now text components have only two handles one the left/right sides. When you resize a component horizontally, FlairBuilder will resize it accordingly on vertical so the entire text will show and fit nicely.

Date field format

You can now choose the format of the date displayed in a date picker component. Just double click it to change the default format.

Hotspot component

Sometimes, you may need to attach a mouse click event action to a certain area of an image, for instance. I have been requested for a hotspot component, similar to those used in HTML image maps, and here you have it! This component will look green and semi-transparent in design mode and invisible in preview mode.

Horizontal radio buttons

Sometimes, depending on space available, you’ll want to align horizontally a set of radio buttons. I have introduced a small feature that allows you to change the direction of radio button groups.

And finally…

Tabs positioning

There a many cases where you’ll need to position tabs in a different position than the regular top-left one. I have put two small controls that will allow you to “rotate” the tabs and position them in all possible. Here’re few options:

These being said, until next time…

Wait, I have a surprise for you! Although I’ve been working hard lately to get it ready for this release, I said I should rather give you first these few updates and then focus entirely on this new exciting feature. What is it? Well, simply said it’s the ability to import your Balsamiq Mockups sketches into FlairBuilder and turn them into real interactive prototypes and wireframes. There are few more things that I need to get fixed before letting it out, at least as a beta feature. It will surely be a feature that will evolve as people use it. Fortunately, Balsamiq Mockups remained a dedicated, focused product so my work of importing mockups into FlairBuilder proved to be simple and straightforward enough. There are some significant differences that I’ll detail later, but I am also proud to say that FlairBuilder is almost there with its components sets. Beside iPhone support, and some unnecessary components, there are only few missing that I’ll have to implement these days.

This all for now. Until next time…

Unknown, here I come!

It’s been quite a while since my last blog update but here you have it! I am soooo pleased to announce this exciting new release: FlairBuilder 1.6. After few weeks of hard work and a tremendous amount of extremely valuable feedback from users, I am ready now to let you know about this important update containing lots of new functionality and features. As usually, I’ll take them one by one:

Floating non-modal panels

This is something I worked very hard on and I’m very excited about it. Basically you now have the option to display non-modal panels over the content of the page. The exciting thing about it is that you can easily define the content of these panels and you are free to put anything inside. You can even put components that themselves open up other floating panes.

Support for grids

I’m sure that this will excite many of the webdesigners out there. FlairBuilder is now one of the few (the only?) tool with native support for grids. And by support I mean flexible and dynamic configuration of the columns in the grid. You can dynamically update the grid settings and see the result live. If you define a grid configuration for a master page, all pages assigned to this master page will also display the same settings.

Ribbon component

With Ribbon component becoming a defacto standard in the upcoming Windows 7 release, you’ll be happy to find out that FlairBuilder offers you such a component to use in your mockups. It is very similar with the tabs component. Each tab consists of one or more groups. Each group is named and has a container in which you can place anything you want.

Charts: Columns, bars, lines and pie chart

Someone < href="http://happyt.wordpress.com/2009/05/27/thoughts-on-wireframes-and-mock-ups/">asked for it and now that someone got it! I am looking forward to hear from you about this charts support, how you like it and if you think it can be improved.

Use a font of your choice

You can now choose a font from your system to use in the wireframes. This opens up FlairBuilder for non-western languages, as for instance Japanese. Thanks so much Akira for helping me with this!

Other small improvements

You can now set your own icon, no matter how large, for a button. Buttons may also display the content vertically.

Two user settings will now be persisted: palette buttons size (small/large) and the font choice.

A new action: Navigate to URL. This might be useful when you’ll want to demonstrate integration with other existing sites or systems.

Browse a card-stack has been renamed to Browse tabs/cards, and you can now also browse through the tabs of accordion, ribbon and tabs components. Enjoy!

As usual I’m very willing to hear from you about what works and what doesn’t work for you, if you have any suggestions or critics: Speak up!!

Unknown, here I come!

So, here’s a quick post. It’s late in the night and I’m chatting with a client about some of the upcoming features in FlairBuilder. While working on one of them, I had to add support for uni-dimensional resizing of a component, that is, you’ll only be able to resize a component on one direction. Then I was amused about how funny does a component look with a single handle:

Like a little baby with a single tooth. Please, allow me to have this kind of moments. It’s 2 o’clock in the morning.

Talk to you soon!

Hey there! One month of business. And what a month! Clients worldwide, many releases, lots of bug fixes and improvements and more than $3000 revenue. Not much some would say, but enough for a small guy like me making his first steps as an entrepreneur.

I should blog more, that’s for sure. I haven’t lately as I’ve been working hard on getting a new important release out sometime next week. Or the week after. What’s important is that FlairBuilder has been growing steadily and healthy. Many bugs were squashed thanks to the small community built around the product. These days I just passed over the 100th support ticket. Quite a milestone, no?

Since this post was more meant to say “Hi!”, I’ll not get back to work. Oh, by the way there are two things I’d like to talk about, though.

One: Today a serious bug caused a customer to loose her project. That was embarrassing for me and I was happy to refund her as a small compensation. I did my best and solved the issue as fast as possible, uploading a bug-fix release in about an hour. Beside the bug fix, I also added a small piece of code that will constantly save a revision of your current project. The location of that file is in your USER_DIR/.flairbuilder/restore/MyProjectName_timestamp.fbp. If anything bad happens and you loose your work, not necessarily because of FlairBuilder, be sure to go to this folder and check the last file saved in here. It should be pretty recent, less than a minute or so.

Two: It’s been a while since I wanted so much to tell everyone how much money I get every month that now, I can’t help but thinking this is an oporturtunity for me to say it out loud! I made $3000 a month and is more than my gross income as a full-time employee! Yay!

I’ll get back to you with more details about the upcoming release. As I said, I should blog and tweet more.

Unknown, here I come!