GUI Design Studio Professional Changelog

What's new in GUI Design Studio Professional 5.0.164.0

May 16, 2016

Color Swatches:
Color swatches give you enormous control over your design with the flexibility to try out different color schemes at the flick of a switch. Create new swatches and duplicate, edit or delete existing ones.
Themes:
In the past, we’ve had to update the rendering code to provide different visual styles for each element.
So, with version 5.0, you can now use a new method to change the look and feel of elements using CSS rules and associated image asset files, wrapped up in themes.
The built-in “Sketch” visual style.
The built-in “Windows Vista” visual style.
The new “Windows Modern” theme.
Other Changes:
There are over 20 other small changes and fixes to improve capabilities and behaviour, including new expression functions for advanced prototypes.
This is just the start for version 5. We have some major new design layout features in the works so watch this space for more news.

New in GUI Design Studio Professional 4.6.155.0 (Jul 23, 2013)

New Chart Elements:
At long last, you can now add a variety of common charts to your designs, each with many customization options
Titles
Data Labels
Data
Colour Schemes
Customization
Tree Grid Hybrid Element:
As an experimental feature, you can now combine a Tree Element with a Table Element to create a highly effective Tree Grid hybrid element
It was always possible to create a static mock-up of such a design before, but now, when a Tree is placed on top of a Table element, the two are synchronized to ensure that vertical scrolling, selections and row visibility are kept in harmony.
Other changes:
Corner radius options added to Rounded Rectangle Shape
Every corner has independent X and Y radius options for full (CSS3-style) flexibility
For speed of entry in the most common case, a button allows the first entry to be copied to all others
A further button copies the first X-Y pair to all other corners
Per-column control of Table selection highlighting
Previously, you could only choose to highlight the entire selected row or the text of the first non-fixed column on a selected row
Now, each column has an independent option of whether to highlight the content or not when the row is selected
The old option now controls whether the full box or just the text is highlighted
Useful for getting certain Tree Grid designs looking right
New Tree selection highlight options
The highlight text and background colours are now selectable
The highlight style can now be set to: Text, Extended, Full or None
Useful for getting certain Tree Grid designs looking right
Onward connections from Message and Scenario boxes
Now fixed to use Left Click rather than follow the input trigger event
This is most useful when using scenario boxes from ‘Show’ events
It’s more intuitive and saves having to change the ongoing connections to match
Document windows only maximize themselves on startup
The first document you open will maximize
Thereafter, the current maximized/cascaded/tiled state will be honoured
Important if you work on multiple designs or views of the same design at the same time
Background Sketch transparency removed
Affects Web Page and Frame Window elements
This was impacting performance without adding much benefit
New text expression functions
LEFT, RIGHT, MID, REVERSE, TOUPPER, TOLOWER.
Take a look at the “Expressions Reference” in the Help to see what they all do.
Modified expression functions
CONTAINS, CONTAINSEXACT, INLIST, INLISTEXACT.
These now return a 1-based index value instead of a simple 1/0 boolean result.
Take a look at the “Expressions Reference” in the Help to see what they all do.
CSV data file editor improved
You can now choose to insert (Insert key) or append (Alt+Insert) new data records.
Pasting will insert a new record rather than overwrite the selected record.
Right-click context menu added for main data editor.
Column identification fixed (for field insertion/deletion) when horizontally scrolled.
Bugs fixed:
Fixes made to scrolling and moving Components.
Fix to subtle issues involving Component sharing.
Fix to blocking of further connections after Message and Scenario boxes.
Fix to Paint Properties for single selection of Connections.
Fix to Undo/Redo of bulk Paint Properties operations.
Fix to automatic navigations firing when screens are hidden.
Fix to fixed columns Table scrolling.
Fix to Table element scrolling to externally added items.
Fix to Table element crash with sorting and empty CSV file.
Fix to rare documentation generation crash with looped Scenarios.
Fix to Storyboard element names in generated documentation.

New in GUI Design Studio Professional 4.5.151.0 (Feb 19, 2013)

New Data Editor:
Relying on the use of external CSV data file editors was never going to be optimal and was only intended as a short-term solution.
If you’d like to continue using Microsoft Excel, or other application, as your CSV file editor, there’s a Preference option to allow you to do this. Otherwise, the default will be to open up the new, internal editor.
While this is a simple editor, it has all you need to create and edit data files, including full undo and redo capabilities.
There’s also a nice function to fill a column with unique ID values to allow record (row) identification and relationships between data tables.
Create, Read, Update and Delete (CRUD):
In version 4.4, you could navigate between records and display data but you couldn’t modify it.
Version 4.5 lets your prototypes Create, Read, Update and Delete records from data tables with these additional action elements.
Now, if you want to, you can test out your interface to properly experience the flow of creating new data or to see what should happen when you delete every record.
But you don’t have to worry about messing up your CSV files that you spent all that time carefully filling with useful test data.
GUI Design Studio will save all changes to temporary session files so all changes made while running the prototype are still there for the next test run, but you can restore the original CSV data at any time.
Filters and Queries:
In any real application, you rarely work with the entire set of records from a single data table. Instead, you extract filtered sets of records and build new tables from relationships between other tables.
The new Run Query action element lets you do this by combining records from multiple data tables, referencing data from lookup tables and specifying filter conditions.
Scrolling Without Scroll Bars:
You can put large content into a scrolling region by placing it in a separate design file then including that as a resizable Component. A property option lets you lock it to the size you specify.
That put scroll bars on the Component so you could, well… scroll the content.
That’s fine until you start designing touch-based mobile applications where scroll bars are not wanted. Until now, you had no choice but to include scroll bars anyway and simply note the fact that the real app wouldn’t have them.
But now you have the option to turn the scroll bars off completely, always display them, or use the previous automatic behaviour where scroll bars are only shown when needed.
Other changes in version 4.5:
New “View | Navigation Components” command (Ctrl+Shift+F8 hotkey)
To help with editing complex designs where many connections can obscure underlying elements, this new view option allows them to be temporarily hidden.
This works on a per-view basis and is not remembered between sessions.
New “Show” event trigger
This allows navigation to be activated when a window appears, for example, after “Show Window” or Modal Popup”.
This will typically be used to Set Data or Run Queries.
Note that it only works on the main window being shown and not on any contained elements.
Additional navigation from primary elements
Web Page, Web Page Part and Frame Window elements are now allowed to be the source of a navigation, mainly to support the new “Show” event trigger.
Frame Windows now also allow for a separate navigation from their client areas.
Display optimization tweaks
Optimization tweaks to help keep the display updated with data and selection changes, especially with Message Box pop-ups.
Stabilized Popup Help topics
Popup Help topics now try to stay in one place when clicking on related links rather than having to chase them around the screen.
To see them in action, try right-clicking controls in dialogs or hitting F1 from time-to-time!
New expression functions
LISTADD, DATA, LOOKUP, POWER, ROUND, MROUND, RANDOM.
Take a look at the “Expressions Reference” in the Help to see what they all do.
Improved integration of data records
Table and List elements now better integrate and synchronize with data records.
Record selection in one directly affects the other.
Tables may be sorted in a different order than the data table itself.
Default content in new CSV data files
New Data Files now have some simple default content to act as example data.
This is also an attempt to help Microsoft Excel make more sense of the file and behave properly (when not using the internal CSV data editor, though this only partially helps anyway).
Bugs fixed in version 4.5:
Fix to image files being locked.
Fix to Mouse Over crash with Modal Choice Popups.
Fix to crash with empty, sorted List Box.
Fix to nested conditional/component interaction bug.
Fix to nested scrolling components problems.
Fix to hidden nested component blocking interaction.
Fix to Tables and List Boxes using data records without a variable.
Fix to Modal Choice Popup and data record selection.
Fix to dynamic popup List Box item selection.
Fix to self-referencing variable expression assignment.
Fix to inappropriate controls appearing in List Box Data editor.
Fix to Edit Boxes with substituted text.
Fix to multiple expressions in substituted text.

New in GUI Design Studio Professional 4.4.144.0 (Sep 3, 2012)

New CSV Data Features:
Data tables are CSV text files containing rows and columns of data. They act like tables within a relational database. The first row contains the name for each field in the table and each subsequent row represents a data record.
Enhancing the Table Element:
Up until now, the Table element has been rather static. You could scroll the content and, through properties, indicate selected rows but you couldn’t interact with it further. Adding interactive features has been a primary request from users.
Row Selection
We’ve now added interactive row selection with keyboard navigation and multiple row selections using mouse clicks combined with the Shift and Ctrl keys, just like Lists and Trees.
Row Navigation
As with the other controls, you can now make connections from individual Table rows to add actions and other navigational behaviour. Sometimes you want to perform some action regardless of which row is selected. In that case, hold Ctrl down while making the connection to link from all rows as one. This also works for List elements!
Column Type
For presentation purposes, you can now select the data type for each column as Text, Image, Icon or Checkbox.
Variable Support
With the new selection capabilities, Tables can now be assigned to a Variable, just like List and Tree elements, with similar sub-variables. Since Tables have multiple columns, a new property lets you select which one contains the significant data to return for selected rows.
Data Integration
Tables can be attached to a CSV data table. When the prototype is running, it will take its data from there instead of using design-time data. In future, any changes the prototype makes to the underlying data table will be reflected in the Table element automatically, but that’s for later! Note that List elements also have this new ability.
Animation:
This almost went under-the-radar as one of those relatively small features that could make a big difference, especially for all those people that asked for it.
We’ve added native support for animated GIF files.
Other Changes:
Variable support added for icons and images. This works in the same way as Table image and icon columns.
Import images command added.
Node text colour and italic option added to Trees.
Opening folders in Explorer also select files now.
System menu crash fixed.
Element interaction on top of components fixed.
Replace Window fix for nested components.
Frame Window elements fixed for monochrome Vista style.
Horizontal Scroll Bars fixed for right-to-left mirroring.
Table header hit testing fixed for horizontal scrolling.