Hi there,

Coming up shortly after the exciting 1.6 release, here’s a new set of updates to your beloved wireframe/prototyping tool.

Label/Title/Paragraph resize

How often did you want to resize a portion of text such that it will wrap nicely on multiple lines? Well, now it’s possible and FlairBuilder will let you do just that offering you more options for text components.

Notice how now text components have only two handles one the left/right sides. When you resize a component horizontally, FlairBuilder will resize it accordingly on vertical so the entire text will show and fit nicely.

Date field format

You can now choose the format of the date displayed in a date picker component. Just double click it to change the default format.

Hotspot component

Sometimes, you may need to attach a mouse click event action to a certain area of an image, for instance. I have been requested for a hotspot component, similar to those used in HTML image maps, and here you have it! This component will look green and semi-transparent in design mode and invisible in preview mode.

Horizontal radio buttons

Sometimes, depending on space available, you’ll want to align horizontally a set of radio buttons. I have introduced a small feature that allows you to change the direction of radio button groups.

And finally…

Tabs positioning

There a many cases where you’ll need to position tabs in a different position than the regular top-left one. I have put two small controls that will allow you to “rotate” the tabs and position them in all possible. Here’re few options:

These being said, until next time…

Wait, I have a surprise for you! Although I’ve been working hard lately to get it ready for this release, I said I should rather give you first these few updates and then focus entirely on this new exciting feature. What is it? Well, simply said it’s the ability to import your Balsamiq Mockups sketches into FlairBuilder and turn them into real interactive prototypes and wireframes. There are few more things that I need to get fixed before letting it out, at least as a beta feature. It will surely be a feature that will evolve as people use it. Fortunately, Balsamiq Mockups remained a dedicated, focused product so my work of importing mockups into FlairBuilder proved to be simple and straightforward enough. There are some significant differences that I’ll detail later, but I am also proud to say that FlairBuilder is almost there with its components sets. Beside iPhone support, and some unnecessary components, there are only few missing that I’ll have to implement these days.

This all for now. Until next time…

Unknown, here I come!