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

All posts in Feature

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 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.

Hotkeys and Context Menu

ForeUI will not have any boring document (except optional daily tips).
So the context menu in plot area is also the document of the hotkeys 🙂context_menu