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!
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Saw the post on twitter, hope to give it a try.