Small Release: Snap to Grid and Bug Fixes

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Hi there,

This week I will be heading for Berlin for this annual European Conference of Software. I am very excited about it. There are very interesting peoples and talks in the agenda and I will surely have a lot to learn.

That’s why I didn’t want to put too much into this week release, just to make sure that there will not be hidden bugs I could not address quickly. Nevertheless, there is one thing in this release that excites me a lot.

Snap to Grid

One of the things that is very CPU intensive in FlairBuilder right now is the snapping feature. Although it lets you align objects nicely one near another, it also needs to do all these computations that can became pretty large in crowded spaces. Besides that, it also gets messy when moving small objects through those crowded spaces. It will snap in all directions and precise placing becomes very tedious.

Anyways, the fact is that following a genius hint from D. Bowles in an email conversation, I went ahead and implemented snapping to a 5px/5px grid in something like an hour or two (it actually took 5 minutes, but all the bells and whistles around it took a bit more ). Now, the entire positioning process is much more smoother and just feels better. I really hope you’ll like it as much as I do.

I enabled it by default because I think it offers a better experience. But, if you want to enable the old snapping mode, just go to the new Settings menu entry (I renamed the old View), and beneath that you’ll find a Snap to peer menu entry. Whatever option you select, it will be remembered on application re-start.

Bug fixes

We got a few of those.

It seems that when closing a pop-up from the X button, and not through the ‘Close pop-up’ action, the ‘Go to another page’ action was not functioning anymore. Thanks so much Gerhard W. for helping me on !

The ribbon bar was not catching up properly the theme of the project and the content was always displaying in the Sketch theme. Thanks Renee Davies for letting me know about this. It wouldn’t have made it in this release otherwise. I wouldn’t have made a quick bug fix release just for it, nevertheless, but still I’m happy it found out about it just in time. I don’t 4 digits version numbers.

One last thing, the Video Player component got all messed up when I added the Image import feature. Although Video Player is not yet fully implemented, because you can not take the video files with the FlairBuilder project file, still it’s useful as a proof of concept or it is actually functional when you’re demoing from your own computer. I will do my best to find ways for it to be functional on your viewers computers, too. If you’re using this component or would like to use it, please let me know what are your needs and we’ll find a solution together.

Thanks so much once again for all your great support and for helping me making FlairBuilder the best prototyping tool the money can buy.

Unkown, here I come!

PS: I’ll try to blog from Berlin and post pictures made with my brand you Canon 500D camera.

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