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 April, 2009

Using Images in ForeUI

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When we create UI prototype for our product with ForeUI, we may need to use some images (for example, icons in menu).   ForeUI provides a very flexible and easy way to manage the images within the mockup, there is an “image dock” for every mockup, which will maintain all used images. 

The image dock is hidden by default, since we don’t need to work on it directly  in most cases, but it is working silently  in the background.  It just like a storehouse, caching all images that used by any element.    Each image in the dock will have its own identification, any element that use this image is actually link to its identification.   For example, a button use the image with “img1” identification as its icon,  you can insert the “[img1]” at the beginning of its text, and ForeUI will recognize it and show the image as the icon of button.

edit-button-text1

Yes we can input that “[img1]” in the button text to assign an icon for it, but we don’t have to do so,  since we have more convenient approach:  specify the image in the floating tool panel, see the figure below:

specify_image

We don’t have to understand how the image dock works, we just choose the image we need, ForeUI will take care of all the rest.  We can check the image dock at any time, just click the “Image Dock” button on the top-right corner of the plot, we can see all used  images:

 imagedock_list1

You can single-click each image in the list to see what can we do on it, also you can double-click it to make some processing on the image.  Remarks:  Once you make change on the image, all elements that use this image will be updated automatically.

Preview of Windows XP Theme

Currently we are developing two UI themes: Windows XP and Mac OS X, I believe that the Windows XP theme will be finished within this week, and the Mac OS X theme may be next week.

Here is a screenshot of the Windows XP UI theme (which is still under development):

Windows XP UI Theme

Windows XP UI Theme

In the screenshot, you can see the elements within the plot are rendered with Windows XP style, that means you can preview your software UI for specific platform, that’s cool 😉

ForeUI Website Startup

Now ForeUI have its own website!  Although ForeUI is not offically launched yet, we think it is better to have an offical site first.  

Also we open our support forum in getsatisfaction.com, you can also access it via the “Support” button on the top-right corner of the website.  We like the platform provided by getsatisfaction.com, which allow us to provide our support openly, and can help more people with less effort. 😉

ForeUI Alpha Version Released

Here is a good news: ForeUI alpha version is released!  This version of ForeUI has most features in our list, you can make mockup, save it to .4ui file (zip format actually, just change the name), export it to png image… 

There is still a key feature missing: theme switching.  Let me explain what it is,  the default theme is wireframe (as you can see now), we will provide Windows theme, Mac theme and Java theme latter.  We can design the mockup with any theme, and we can change the theme at any time.  That means we can preview the UI effect on Window, Mac OS or Java for the same UI design!

ForeUI Aplha Demo

The alpha version can be download from the links below.  If you are using Windows and you are not sure if you have JRE5+ installed, please download the Windows Installer, it will take care everything and make sure you can launch the software.  If you download the minimal package, you need to install JRE by yourself.


Enjoy it! Please don't forget to give me your feedback;)