Archive for October, 2006

Announcing the winner of our "spot the film" competition…

Monday, October 23rd, 2006

Thanks to those that took part in this little bit of fun, both on the blog and by email.

The correct answer to the film is of course “Harvey“, made in 1950 and starring James Stewart. It’s a wonderful film that you really must see!

The odd one out in the cast list was Mary Chase who wrote the original stage play and also the screenplay for the film (with Oscar Brodney).

And the winner is… Kevin Murray with an amazingly quick answer. Ian Summers was a very close runner up being pipped at the post by just a few minutes. Well done to both of you!

We’d like to think that such fast and accurate answers came from your encyclopedic knowledge of great films and nothing at all to do with the use of Internet search engines or online film databases ;-) . Congratulations however you got there!

Whether you managed to answer the competition or not, I hope you managed to take a look at the Outlook-alike design example from the last post. If you just look at the video you’ll get some idea of what GUI Design Studio can do with your user interface designs.

If you download the distribution file (and Viewer) then you can also try out the application simulation, have a look at how the project was put together and maybe get some tips for your own design projects.

GUI Design Studio Clones Microsoft Outlook?

Wednesday, October 18th, 2006

Following last week’s launch of GUI Design Studio version 2.2, we’ve had quite a few questions about what it’s really capable of and maybe you’ve been wondering about that yourself.

We figured the best way to answer that was by way of an example prototype design. The trouble was, we didn’t have anything big enough or suitable enough in-house and we certainly can’t share any of our customers’ designs.

So we set ourselves a challenge. What could we put together quickly as a good example? Not a simple 5-screen demo, but a fully fledged application. It needed to have real-world appeal and be the type of application that’s familiar to as many of you as possible.

The answer was staring us in the face… (more…)

Low-Fidelity or High-Fidelity Prototypes for Software?

Thursday, October 12th, 2006

Let me quickly explain the terms here. Fidelity refers to the level of detail, accuracy or coverage of a prototype. It can relate to functionality but most people use the term in relation to visual appearance and that’s what I’ll be referring to here.

So the lowest of the low-fidelity prototypes are very quick hand sketches while the highest are fully detailed, pixel perfect renditions.

The obvious advantages of low-fidelity prototypes are the speed at which they can be put together and therefore the low cost involved. After all, anyone can quickly scribble designs on a piece of paper. (more…)

GUI Design Studio 2.2 Released

Tuesday, October 10th, 2006

Caretta Software GUI Design Studio version 2.2 is now available for immediate download. If you’ve already tried it then check your email today for download instructions otherwise you can request a trial.

Font picker drop-down showing selection historyIn the last post I mentioned the new fonts support in 2.2. You can see from this screenshot that the Typeface picker has a useful history feature that places recent selections near the top.

This also includes active fonts in open documents so that you can easily maintain a consistent look. There’s also a Quick Pick field to grab not only a recent typeface but also the size and attributes too!

I also mentioned the International language support. We put a lot of effort into getting this right and ensuring that our file formats remained completely compatible.

Hebrew dialog sectionTo serve as an example, we’ve created a contact information dialog that’s been translated into Russian and Hebrew.

The Russian version is fairly typical of user interface translation projects where subtle layout changes are required to adjust for the differing text lengths.

The Hebrew version was more of a challenge. Not only were there text size differences but the whole design needed to be flipped horizontally for right-to-left reading.

Fortunately, GUI Design Studio 2.2 includes full mirroring support that correctly reverses frame window caption bars and places scroll bars and combo drop-down arrows, etc. on the left where they belong instead of the right.

You can take a look at the example and download the designs from our International Dialog Gallery Page.

Next time, I’ll have something to say about wireframe mockups.

GUI Design Studio 2.2 Introduces International Features

Friday, October 6th, 2006

GUI Design Studio version 2.2 will be released next Tuesday (10 October 2006). It’s a little later than we’d initially planned but we wanted to make sure it was well tested and as robust as possible before release.

With so many users finding new ways to use the tool, we encountered a few behavioural hiccups with certain aspects of component design usage that needed to be fixed, particularly when you start layering component storyboards within each other!

Version 2.2 now fully supports International language text on designs. If you need to design for a right-to-left language such as Arabic or Hebrew, right-alignment and full mirroring is supported for all appropriate elements. We’ll post some examples of this next week.

The most notable new feature is the ability to use any font for all text based elements. In addition, the new default font preference, when used in conjunction with the look and feel preferences, opens up an interesting way to switch between the ‘final’ look of a design and a ‘wireframe mockup’. There are new sections in the User Manual to explain all of this.

With some further minor fixes and tweaks, version 2.2 has been significant in creating an even more robust platform for new feature development.

Comments welcome!