Hello everyone,

This is an absolutely awesome and exciting release! I kid you not. Without any delay, here’s what’s new:

Better page embedding

You can now override some of the properties of components within an embedded page. That means that you can create your custom component on one page, then embed it in another page and also modify it on the spot. You can reposition components, change style and labels (for some components). Let me know what you think about the feature!

Project variables&events

This is huge. The possibilites are countless. You can now effectively communicate between pages with simple custom events. Say, if on one page you create a new user, on the previous page you can add that user to the list of users. Sweet, huh?

More than that. You can embed variables in text components as $myVariable and that text will be replaced (and updated!!!) with the value of the variable. Even when the variable’s value changes. Oh, and you now have a specific action to modify the value of a variable.

Even more. Each component on the page that has a name without spaces will be automatically turned into a variable. This means that you can connect the value of text component to the value of text input, for instance. Examples will come shortly!

Update components styling

I have added a new action that lets you update the styling/formatting of a set of components upon a certain event. Which is like totally awesome, if you ask me. It’s now super easy to create roll-over effects, for instance. No more double-components for the two styles.

Better conditional behavior execution

Until now, you had to create separate conditions for each action on a user event. That was cumbersome, I know. Now there’s a smart action, IF condition, that will test a condition you create and execute the next actions only if that condition passes. Long explanation, but you get the idea. Oh, and there’s also an ‘Else’ flavor for that action, if you are familiar with the If…Else… structures in programming languages.

This is all, but it’s a lot. I like the simplicity and power of the new features. However, I’m eagerly waiting for your feedback. Don’t keep me waiting, please.

Enjoy!

Hello there,

Yet another release from FlairBuilder. This is an exciting one!

Embed a page in other pages

In previous versions you could attach any page as a master to a page. Now you can do even more. You can embed a page into another page, and whenever you make a change to embedded page, all places where you put it will get updated. How cool is that?

All you have to do is shift+drag a page from the Pages palette.

Component Libraries in one file

Previously, if you created custom components, they’d all stay in their own file. Now that’s changed. Now there’s *.fbl files, which can hold one page filled with custom components. Also, custom components will work like stencils, that is, if you drop them on the page, they will loose their connection to the source document. They will not automatically update if you update the library. It’s only fair to be that way!

Custom images are now loaded from the /assets/ folder

Good news, huh? No more searching for that hidden .flairbuilder folder. Those days are gone, now.

It’s small but big release. Enjoy it!

Hello everyone,

It’s been a while since the last release announcement. Which doesn’t mean that I have been in a vacation all this time. In fact, quite a few releases were made. For instance, just a few weeks ago, PDF export was released. Then, in the same release, the layers functionality got a make-over. But lets take them one by one, adding the cool new stuff in this release.

Menu Bar Improvements

Menu bar items now have hover behavior, and can be rich formatted with color and icons.

New DateChooser and DateField components

This was a must. I like the simplicity of the new look!

New Window component

I have updated the Window component with several updates. Besides the ability to add the controls to the header and the scrollbar, you can also put stuff into the Window component. If you click on the plus/minus icon in the viewer, it’ll toggle the content.

The controls are not interactive, but you can put hotspots on them and add functionality as you wish.

DataGrid now supports tree like columns

I love this one! Will you, too? The syntax for making tree rows is the same as of the Tree component. Just prepend cell definition with dashes. FlairBuilder will know what to do from there.

Line height for Tree and List components

A long awaited little feature has finally found it’s way in. You can adjust the line height of the Tree or List components, just like you do with the Data Grid. Also, you can choose to display a scrollbar on the side of the components.

Actually, the scrollbar has also been added to the Accordion components, Title Window, Data Grid, List and Tree. Fun!

Other fixes and improvements

* Fixed the project tree view. Pages were disappearing when moved around.
* GroupBox component was showing wrong font size by default.
* Removed window buttons from Browser Chrome component.
* Send/Bring buttons now stay open for multiple operations.
* Draw buttons now stay selected while drawing.
* PDF export bug: container components were excluded from export.
* ComboBox popup closes when clicking outside.
* ComboBox text was bold by default.
* When positioning a layer, it will not snap to the 5×5 grid anymore.
* Image component got transparent when copy/pasting it.
* Hidden components were visible on layers in preview mode.
* CheckBox group now supports events properly.

I hope you’ll enjoy this release!

Let’s face it! That’s how you learn, that’s how we all learn. During my high-school, my father used to take me as a guitar player in his band on various occasions.

And you know what? That’s how I learned to play guitar. Well, mostly. But once on stage, I would spend all of my time there picking on the keyboard player, trying to figure out the chords he was playing and struggling to keep up with him. I had to continuously steal!

When it comes to design (or, really, anything else), being original is really hard. I’d argue that sometimes is even dangerous.

However, it’s logo design that requires originality to a higher grade. And with thousands of logos out there, it’s really hard to be original.

There’s a lot of examples where big companies have failed to come up with something truly original. For instance, what would you say about these two logos:

They surely look alike. I won’t tell you which one came first.

Graham Smith goes into detail about what he calls “The Uncertainty And Pains of Originality In Logo Design“. Very good reading!

A question I may ask, following the argument that Graham is making in his article: what do you do when you find that someone else, most certainly independently of you, came up with a similar design?

You know how science works? It starts with a question, then they test a possible answer. Then they ask more questions, and then do some more tests. Then they build theories, and they test those too.

The theory that passed all tests will be the winning theory. Or so you think! In fact, there’s no winning theory. Never! Because you know what they’ll do? They will do even more tests, imagine more facts to test the ‘winning’ theory against them.

You should do the same. Be a scientist doing UX science. Your intuitions won’t work, your boss won’t tell you what’s right, your colleagues don’t know either.

The rest of the reasons for performing extensive testing are found here. Excellent article!