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 January, 2011

Vacation for Chinese New Year

The Chinese new year (Spring Festival, i.e. 3rd Jan 2011) is coming!  On the traditional Chinese calendar, year 2011 is called the year of rabbit, while the previous year is the year of tiger.  Spring Festival is the biggest holiday in China.  Chinese people usually will take a long vacation and come back to hometown, stay with the family, make delicious food, set off firecrackers and visit friends etc.

We are going to take one month vacation from next Monday.  During the vacation, we will still be there to provide forum/email support.  So the only difference is that we don’t release new version during the vacation.

Happy Spring Festival!

PS: I just noticed that ForeUI has been listed as “Featured Download” item on Apple.com (in the “Development Tools” category).  That’s wonderful!

ForeUI is Listed as "Featured Download" in Apple.com

ForeUI is Listed as "Featured Download" in Apple.com

ForeUI V2.65: Animated GIF Support and More

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Happy New Year to you all!

Today ForeUI’s first release in Year 2011 is out!  Want to know what’s new in V2.65?  Please read on.

Animated GIF Support

Now you can insert animated GIF files into your prototype, and they will be really animated in simulation!  So far there are four types of elements support this feature: Image Box, Window, Tree and Multilevel Menu.  With our on-going effort, more elements will support this.

Use Animated GIF in ForeUI Elements

Change  Window Title in Simulation

The Window element supports a new “Set Window Title” action, which allows you to change the window title in simulation.  The new title supports property, so you can include some dynamic value in the window title.

Set Focus in Simulation

The TextEditBox and Spinner elements now support a new “Set Focus” action, which will set focus on the specific element.  This can be used to set the default focused element when page is loaded.

Some Enhancements:

  • Show image button on floating tool pane for MultilevelMenu element.
  • Enable hotkeys for cut/copy/paste/delete on embedded element.

Fixed Bugs:

  • Bug_0271: “Mouse Out” event for Multilevel Menu is triggered when mouse is hovering on the element.
  • Bug_0272: The delay value in “Pause a while” window should be selected by default.
  • Bug_0273: Can not start selecting from above of plot.
  • Bug_0274: The title of Window element does not respect the default font settings.
  • Bug_0275: Table column become wider in simulation.
  • Bug_0276: Table column widths should be synchronized in edit/view modes.

Use MockGen to Generate Mockups from Website

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Several months ago, I had post a review of Looksie, Looksie can generate detailed reports for ForeUI plots.  This morning Xemware just announced the beta version of their brand new web service: MockGen, which can generate (ForeUI or Balsamiq) mockups from existed website online!  It sounds very promising so I try it immediately and write down my experience here 🙂

The web page of MockGen is very simple (as shown below).  There are just a few input fields to accept the parameters for mockups generation.  Some fields have a blue question icon on the right, and you can click the icon to show the explanation of the field.

There are just two required fields: one is your email address and the other is the URL of the existed website.  Other fields can control the pages included in mockups, and you can choose the output format (ForeUI plot or Balsamiq mockups).

I decided to generate a ForeUI plot from LinkedIn website:

So I input my email address to receive the plot, and then input the target URL as “http://www.linkedin.com”:

After clicking the “Generate!” button, I can see a message as below.  So I cross fingers and wait for my plot 😀

It is better than my expection, an email arrived within one minute and it contains a ZIP archive.

The plot file is just in the ZIP archive.  After extracting the file and open the plot in ForeUI, a prototype for LinkedIn website is ready.  The first page is a navigating page and it can bring you to any page within the plot when running the simulation.

This page is the front page in real website.  It is almost perfect, even the hyperlinks are converted to actions in plot.  However the background color is changed to light gray:

After changing the plot background color to white, the final result is very good:

What if we run the generated plot in web browser?  I can’t help trying this and below is the comparation.

As you can see, there is a little offset between real website and the generated plot.  But it is not a big problem and I believe it can be improved in the future, as it is still in Beta state for now.

Dear friends, if you plan to create a prototype base on an existed website, the MockGen service will save you lot of time!  You can click here to try the service, please feel free to leave your comment here if you have any feedback on it.  Tim (the developer of MockGen) will be glad to hear from you 🙂