Hi there,

For the past 3 weeks I have been constantly adding small enhancements and features to the exciting 1.7.0 release. If everything goes well, we will establish a pattern here and will make small releases each week with smaller or bigger additions and features. Stay tuned!

Now, what’s new and in this release? Not much, but nevertheless, I’m sure you’ll find few things that will excite you as much as they excite me.

New Component: Pointy Rectangle

Sorry about the name, couldn’t find a better one. Basically it’s a sort of speech bubble/user comment kind of component. It’s been a while since I have been requested for such a component and I know that some of you have actually tried to hack one. Well, hack no more! Now you have a flexible built-in component that should be pretty easy to use.

Since this kind of component also suites very well for rich tooltips, I also added the ‘pointer’ to the Floating Pane component. For backward compatibility, existing projects will not display this pointer for floating panes. However, new ones have it displayed by default. I said that it’s best for people to notice that the capability is there.  In order to show/hide the pointer for a floating pane, just use the checkbox in the properties panel.

Image/Icon Mouse Interactions

What was possible to achieve with the Image/Icon+HotSpot combination is now also possible only with the Image or Icon components only. This is because I have added Mouse Click and Mouse Double-Click interactions  to those two components. More than that, if you attach an action to a Mouse Click event, the mouse cursor will turn to hand-pointer, just like with the HTML hotspots or HTML links. I know that some of you have tried to mimic toolbar buttons with images and buttons do not have such a behavior, but I think it’s best to use buttons for this. Remember that you can attach your own icons to buttons, and you are not limited to the default set of icons that comes with FlairBuilder.

Image Original Size on Import

I have introduced an intermediary step when importing and image for the Image component. This step allows FlairBuilder to preserve the original width and height of the imported image. Once imported, you can resize it to which ever size you want. If you want to preserve the aspect ratio, just hold Shift key while resizing. Enjoy!

There are a number of improvements that I can already think of for this feature, like for instance an option to turn the image to black’n'white before importing it. Let me know what you think.

Default Page in Viewer

A small addition to the set of project settings options. You may now specify which will be the default page to be displayed in the viewer, that is when first loading the project in one of the two version of the viewer.  There was no way to specify this until now, and the default page was the first entry in the page list. However, since 1.7.0 and hierarchical structure of folders and pages was introduces, so the notion of ‘first page’ got lost. Letting you to specify the Home page is just natural. Feel free now to organize the pages the way you need, feel or like.

And of course, a bunch of other minor bug fixes or enhancements.

What’s Coming Up Next

For the upcoming week I’d like to finish what naturally has started with adding interactions to Image and Icon components. That is: Mouse Enter and Mouse Out. You will be then able to define a separate action for when the use just hovers an Image (as well as Button’s or other components) and an action for when the user actually clicks on that Image. I will have to remake a few of the internals of FlairBuilder design stage but that’s not something you should be concerned about. Everything for the better!

The DataGrid component capabilities are being sometimes insufficient to some of you that are building data intensive application prototypes. I will try to address some of those issues, too.

Of course, there are also the big items on which I am trying to decide what to attack next. Can’t tell too much about it so I will not set wrong expectations. Feel free to shoot me with any idea, suggestion or anything that hurts you right now in FlairBuilder. Email me or use the support forum, whatever suites you better.  I love hearing from you as it keeps me connected with the real world usage of the app.

Until next time… Unknown, here I come!