I am so pleased to announce that after more than a week (you know what they say: “release often, release early” ) of hard work FlairBuilder 1.5 is released with quite a few exciting new features. Go ahead and grab it now and then come back to read all about it!

As usual I’ll start by listing what’s new and afterwards I’ll share with you some thoughts and impressions about my last week as an entrepreneur.

Conditional logic

This is something that, of course, I’m very proud of: You can now define complex conditions to be evaluated before performing an action as a consequence of a user input event. And more than that, these conditions are now based on more than one component on the page. Let me show what this means!

Take, for instance, the case where you have a combo-box with three options Action 1, 2 and 3, and a button that the user clicks to go to another page. Now, you’d want to go to a different page depending on the option selected in the combo-box, or even do different things in different cases. Let’s keep it simple for now. Here’s a screenshot with this situation.

Now, to add restrictions for each of the three “Go to another page” actions and base those restrictions to the combo-box selection, you’ll define conditions by using the little green question mark icon near the action name. Clicking it will give some more options and you’ll basically start by pointing and clicking the combo-box. After you selected the desired component, depending on its type (Combo-box, Text Input, List, Table etc.), you’ll be given the option to create expressions in the form:

<COMPONENT> <PROPERTY> <OPERATOR> <VALUE>

that is, something like in the following screenshot:

I am so excited about this (hence the 1.5 version number) and I look forward to hear how it’s working for you.

Performance improvements

I have made a little but important improvement that will make large projects easier and faster to handle: Now pages are loaded lazily, that is, a page will be loaded from the project file only if needed. It was kindda silly for me to load the whole project upfront, but you know, now FlairBuilder is facing real projects with real needs. Performance is something I want address constantly so expect more improvements coming up very soon!

Components look and feel

Since many wireframe/prototype creators have this concern of presenting something that look too polished, I have simplified the look’n'feel of some of the components, namely the Button, Button bar and Combo-box. But, I also put some more options to make it easier for you to customize them.

Productivity enhancement

I’ve added two shortcuts for a couple of existing features: Ctrl/Cmd+R for exporting a screenshot of the current page to a file, and Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+C to copy the screenshot to the system clipboard.

Also, I’ve added a handy feature that allows you to easily duplicate the selected components: Ctrl/Cmd+D from your keyboard to duplicate the current selection.

Bug fixes

There were, as usual, a bunch of them, of which I’d like to mention only a few:

• Delete/Backspace key was not working on Mac OS. Lucky me, this was first reported in review.
• An embarrassing issue with deleting pages. Thanks renekasbergen for this one, as well for all the others!

I am so lucky to have already a small community of users, some of them very enthusiastic. They really helped me a lot to make the application better and more useful. Tons of ideas and suggestions on my plate coming from them or inspired by their needs. I surely have a lot to do in the following weeks. Also, is such a pleasant feeling to see how people actually use my little app… Well, for fixing bugs, clients had on email me some of their projects files so I could track down the problems. Nevertheless, seeing your own software being useful out there is just plain awesome!

Another week as an entrepreneur

Last week has been an interesting week, so to say. I’m starting to feel the real feeling of being an entrepreneur, entirely on my own. Lots of different things to do, many aspects to take care of. It’s no easy but it’s for sure an one in a life time experience. The first baby steps!

The participation at the <dev:world> Romanian software conference got me with some “networking” that I’m quite proud of. This is something I haven’t actually anticipated at all when submitting for the conference. More about this soon!

I’ll let you now enjoy the brand new and shiny FlairBuilder 1.5!

Unknown, here I come!