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I am a new user looking to buy. I have downloaded and installed the trial to make sure the program will do what I need. After using it for a short period of time I have found issues.

My primary concern is with the following scenario: I loaded a large image of an object I want to prototype – for example an image of a remote control. I created two shapes for simple testing, let’s call them Element A and Element B. I added behavior event actions to Element A so that when it was clicked it toggles the visibility of Element B. I also make the opacity of Element A change when clicked (Mouse Down / Mouse Up) so the user had feedback that A was indeed clicked.

Here is the problem: When I use rectangles for the elements everything works perfectly. But if I use Ellipse, triangles, or polygons it does not work. Nothing at all happens when I click the elements unless they are rectangles. I have only tried using these 4 types so the problem could extend to other objects, but 75% of the 4 I tried do not work. I have switched back and forth between rectangles and other shapes and back to rectangles about 8 times to make sure I was following the exact same steps and setting the exact same settings and I can confirm I am. For whatever reason, my clicks only register for rectangles.

The first elements I tried were Rectangles and I was so pleased with how well this program worked, on multiple browsers, simple yet powerful, and I was excited at it’s potential. But now after branching out I am nervous that the next features I worked with are broken and wonder how many more bugs there may be.

My secondary complaint is that the application behaves differently between the different “look and feel” settings. Personally, I prefer the look and feel of my local OS. However, when set to “System Look and Feel” the program is more buggy and difficult to use. I was forced to change back to EaSynth for usability. For example, when I try to create a new rectangle by selecting the rectangle tool, and then clicking on my plot and dragging an appropriate sized rectangle into existence, the behavior is different for each setting. Under EaSynth the moment I click on my image a rectangle is created (larger than the one I was trying to create). The size of the rectangle does not follow my mouse pointer – I have to resize it by moving my mouse out to it’s current size before it then follows my mouse. This is not ideal, but it is functional. When System look and feel is selected, however, when I click on my plot and try to drag the rectangle size to my desired size the pointer drops the rectangle altogether (EVEN THOUGH I HAVE NOT RELEASED THE MOUSE BUTTON) and automatically grabs an underlying element. This is absolutely unusable because everytime I go to create a new rectangle I accidentally move random elements that were already perfectly placed.

 

EDIT: I forgot to mention that I am using 3.90 SP2 (the most recent version), on Windows 8.1 64-bit. I have tested in Firefox v39, IE v11.0.9600, Opera 30.0, Chrome 43. 

1 answer

Staff July 16, 2015

Hi Nicholas, toggling the visibility of element while clicking on another element is a very commonly used scenario, and it has been intensively tested. I just tried your scenario in a new plot, and I don’t see any problem. No matter what kind of element I use, I can always toggle the visibility of one element (can be any type) when clicking on another element (can be any type too).

When you replace your rectangle element with different element, have you updated the behavior owner (with red flag icon) as well? You need to do so, otherwise the behavior is still bind to the rectangle, instead the new element you use.

If you could not figure out, please send us the plot file so we can check it for you. You can send to support[at]foreui.com

As for your second complaint, I think you are right. We already notice the same issue in some situations. We will work on it and try to improve it. Meanwhile you can work around this issue by using another two ways to add new elements. Did you know there are three ways to add elements? They are listed here: http://www.foreui.com/doc/html/add_move_resize_element.htm. You are using the 3rd way now.

#1
  1. Hello ViVi, I did not "replace" any element at any time in my testing. I completely deleted the element, and began the process again by adding a new element and creating new behavior. I am following the same procedure each time regardless of the element type - but the results are different.When I create the behavior (red flag) it will say "Rectangle_1" when I am using a rectangle, and "Ellipse_1" when I am using an ellipse - if that is what you mean. Yes, I am sure the behavior element and action element are the correct elements.Let me see if I can create a new plot for you, I cannot send my current plot as it contains proprietary images.
  2. To anyone else having this issue, we were able to identify the problems. One was a bug with ForeUI, when an element's opacity was 0 it was marked as transparent and when I tried to change the opacity to 20 it was still (incorrectly) marked as transparent. The second issue is with differences between browsers running on different system OS's. Changing the opacity of an element using the Mouse Up and Mouse Down events are handled inconsistently between browsers - between different HTML object types. It turns out that rectangle objects and other shaped objects are converted by ForeUI to different types of HTML tags and that is why some worked for me while others did not. A successful workaround is to have two overlapping identical elements and to change the opacity property of the bottom element while using the top element to gather and manage mouse click events. For some reason, changing the opacity of an element being interacted with by the mouse has unexpected behavior on some browsers on some systems when used within some HTML tags.
  3. ViVi Staff July 21, 2015
    Thanks Nicholas for the description. Just want to add that, the newly released V4.0 beta has fixed the opacity bug.

This question is now closed