I am most pleased to announce that FlairBuilder 1.0 is released!

Many exciting improvements got into this release. I could only mention first the most important of them: master pages support.

It is now possible to define master pages and assign them to regular pages as background. While designing a page, you’ll be able to also see the master page in the background, slightly fuzzy so you could tell the difference between what’s on the page and what on the master. However, page components will also snap against master page components as if they were on the same page. I’m sure you’ll find it very handy!

A new powerful component found its way in: CardStack. Basically, it lets you define a set of alternative views that you could browse through using the “Browse a CardStack” action attached to other components. For instance, you could create simple pagination using the Link Bar component. “Browse a CardStack” action configuration offers you plenty of options you can choose from.

To make things easier when defining actions for certain events, conditions were introduced for some events. It is obvious that when clicking on a link bar item, or a button bar item, or a tree item, chances are that you’ll want to take different actions, depending on which item was clicked. Or, on the contrary, you will care too much as you may want to consider only the index of the item. Take a look at the configuration panel for “Browse a CardStack” to see which are the options. It should be pretty obvious.

Beside these, there are plenty of fixes and improvements all over the UI. Take a look at the features page for a quick overview of the most important features. Text formating in DataGrid, List or Tree components is also something I’m very excited about.

FlairBuilder is now priced at a promotional price of only $99 USD. That is a 50% discount from the regular price of $199 USD, for the first month after this release. Purchasing a license brings you a full year of free exciting updates, great customer support (I’ll get back on this in just a moment…), and the freedom to install the application on any computer that you own.

Now, some of you may probably wonder “who is this guy and why is he trying to sell yet another prototyping tool”?
In short, I am a Self-employed person based in Bucharest, Romania. I’ve been doing software for the past 6 years. No so long, some may think. That’s true, but coming from Theoretical Physics I dived into software programming with all the passion I was capable of. I always strove to get the best out of my code. Of course, as every Java programmer starts with, by building frameworks, but lately by focusing more and more on what in the end turns out to be the most important element of the entire software development process: the user. How the user uses your software and how easy can it be used are by far the only quality criteria applicable to a piece of software. This increased my determination of doing things right (not perfect, but done right) and also got me to the point where I wanted to build a tool that helps other software creators get things done right.

So here is FlairBuilder, a tool that I’ve been developing for the past 6 months in it’s current shape and for other 6 months before that in a slightly different approach. Overall a whole year in which I set the basis for what I believe to be a very useful tool. But in the end, it’s you to decide its usefulness and it’s your needs that will drive FlairBuilder’s development from now on.

And last, but not least, I’d like to thank to those of you that have helped and supported me with valuable feedback and priceless encouragements.

From now on, there is only one direction: forward!