ForeUI is an easy-to-use UI prototyping tool, designed to create mockup / wireframe / prototypes for any application or website you have in mind.

Archive for March, 2009

A Usable Demo is Coming Soon!

After about one week’s hard work, without saying anything, we make a big progress on ForeUI, now the framework is about to finish, we are working on all kinds of components.

Here is a screen shot of ForeUI, for us it is usable now but we still want to make it better before packing it.  We hope to provide a demo (may be via webstart) next time.

foreui_demo

ForeUI Plot File Format Confirmed

Finally we decide to use zip format, the zip file will pack the xml and images data inside.
XML is a good format to represent such a plot, but it use more disk space and lack the ability to store the binary files (like icon images etc.) So a zip package that pack all these together will be good.
It is easy to extract the zip file and check what’s inside 😉

ForeUI Need JRE5 or Above

Actually we planed to support JRE6+ only, but so far Mac OS X has JRE5 only (it is said to have JRE6 soon, but who knows) , so we changed the plan.
I just check the source code, fortunately most code are compatible with JRE5, but the performance goes down a lot, I heared that JRE6 provides a lot of optimize in runtime, and now I believe it is true.  Anyway, we will optimize the code to improve the performance, we hope ForeUI could work well in both JRE5 and JRE6.

UI Themes in ForeUI

ForeUI will have a special feature: allow changing the theme of the UI prototype, the default theme will be “Wireframe Theme”, which represent the components with wireframe. We will implement at least 3 more themes: Windows Theme, Mac OS X Theme and Java Theme, these themes will simulate the real UI effect, for preview purpose.

For example: the user draw the screen once, then he/she can render it in different themes, to see what will it look like in Mac, in Windows or in Java.

No Update for Two Weeks

Again we have to work on EaSynth L&F designer first, ForeUI has no highest priority at this time.  Anyway, the OX Editon is out and I think it is really good. 

Also there is a new version of EaSynth L&F, so ForeUI will have a better look in the future:-)

We will continue working on ForeUI development from tomorrow on.