March Madness Discount

March 9th, 2010

Version 4 Launch CouponTo celebrate the release of V4.0 of GUI Design Studio, we’re offering you 25% off the list price for the rest of March 2010.

Version 4 has some fantastic new features in which help you get a working prototype in the hands of your users and engineers even faster.

Extended interaction functionality means your user interfaces can be even more realistic than ever with working with data values, conditional content and business rules driving navigation. Custom Elements and Templates let you and your colleagues share your work on multiple projects with ease.

We have some great new features planned for later in the year that will be available free of charge to v4 license holders.

Now is a great time to take advantage of the powerful prototyping features that GUI Design Studio provides, and if you’re an existing user, we’re sure you’ll want to upgrade.

But here is a little incentive…

If you purchase a new license or upgrade from a fully licensed copy of v3 by 31 March 2010, we’ll give you a 25% discount!

Here are the facts:

  List price March offer
GUI Design Studio V4 Express $129 $97
GUI Design Studio V4 Professional $499 $375
Upgrade from Express to Pro $399 $299
Upgrade from v3 to Pro $149 $112

If you’ve been keeping up to date with V3 you’ll know that we’ve released some great features in the last 12 months including the huge Calendar element just last month, so keeping up to date makes sense.

To take advantage of this offer, simply visit the buy page and use coupon code V4-2TKAW8 on the order form, and your 25% discount will automatically be applied. But you’ll need to buy before the end of the month to qualify!

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GUI Design Studio 4.0 Released With New Interaction and Templates

March 9th, 2010

New Version 4.0GUI Design Studio version 4.0 is now available and includes some fantastic new features in two editions, both with a 30-day trial.

The new features are grouped around interactivity and element and design sharing. They enable you to build more realistic and interactive prototypes and to share or reuse individual elements or whole design templates with ease.

New editions

GUI Design Studio is now available in two different editions.

GUI Design Studio Express provides the prototyping functionality that was in v3, but focussed on individuals without the need to share projects and generate specification documentation.

GUI Design Studio Professional builds on v3, adding new interactivity and design sharing features, and is better suited to those working on larger projects, in teams, or on multiple designs.

All projects created in one edition will run in the other, or in the free viewer, except that the enhanced interactivity features in the Professional edition (see below) are not available in the Express edition. You can compare the two editions here.

Prototypes get more interactive (Pro edition only)

As your user interface design develops, everyone involved starts to focus on the details of interactivity. What process does the user need to go through to achieve certain tasks, how many button presses, how much navigation, is it clear and obvious, can they make simple mistakes?

All of these questions, and more, need to be considered in developing and refining a good UI and they cannot be addressed easily in a simple mock-up.

GUI Design Studio v4 introduces a range of new features Read the rest of this entry »

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GUI Design Studio 4.0 Preview – Part 2:
Custom Elements and Templates

February 22nd, 2010

Version 4.0 PreviewGUI Design Studio version 4.0 includes new “Custom Elements” and “Templates”. These complement Components and Libraries already in GUI Design Studio.

They’re simple but they can make a big difference to your productivity by cutting out a huge amount of repetitive work, keeping consistency with house styles and helping you to create designs faster.

Custom Elements

Any folder within the Project tree can be assigned to be a Custom Element Folder. The folder icon then changes to indicate its new status. This is also applied to all of its sub-folders.

Custom Elements Folder

Now, you can create Custom Element designs within the folder and any existing GUI design that you want to be used as a Custom Element can be dragged into it.
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Styling Calendar Controls
- Are 33 colour options enough or too many?

February 4th, 2010

Version 3.6 of GUI Design Studio included a new element for creating Calendar controls.

When we started designing this feature, we looked around for examples of different calendars in desktop and web applications. We found a wide range of different designs; some with one month, some with 3 or 4, some highlighting “today”, others highlighting a particular day or a range of days. Of course, each application had quite a different visual design to its calendars as well.

In the past, we’ve tried to simplify elements and minimize the number of settings and options they have but, with this new element, we felt we had to provide for the increasing demand on design flexibility.

The problem, as all of you designers of great user interfaces will know, is that with flexibility comes complexity. We didn’t want to give you a tool which is hard to learn or slow to use because it has so many options and special cases, but we did want to give you a tool which will let you create the calendar design you need, quickly and simply.
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GUI Design Studio 3.6 Released With New Calendar Elements

January 28th, 2010

New Version 3.6GUI Design Studio version 3.6 is now available for immediate download. This is most likely the last 3.x maintenance release before we launch version 4.0 next month. It contains some fixes and changes based on customer requests and is a free upgrade for all registered users.

For customers using any prior version of GUI Design Studio, simply install the new version and your existing licenses will continue to work.

Calendar Elements

Calendar ElementsWith so many requests from users, we’ve finally added Calendar elements to the mix. This was essentially the last missing native Windows control and a common feature in a vast number of desktop and Web applications.

So why has it taken so long to appear? Well, that’s a very good question. Right from the start, with the version 1.0 release 5 years ago, we realized that calendar controls were important. But rather than create complex elements for every conceivable situation, the idea then was to provide basic building blocks from which other elements could be assembled.

The very first design samples library contained various calendar controls with different display options. We thought that this would be enough for simple mock-up purposes. Well, clearly, we were wrong! Creating calendar controls from scratch using text boxes and other elements is both tedious and time consuming, especially if you don’t want a design that’s stuck in 2005!
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