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Maqetta Preview 2

Preview 2 release notes

The Preview 2 release includes the following updates:

• Mobile authoring updates. The most significant new capabilities with the Preview 2 release are in the area of mobile user interface authoring. In the previous release (Preview 1), the mobile authoring features were barely there and mostly showed a vision for future mobile authoring features. With the Preview 2 release, significant mobile authoring capability is now available. In particular:
  • Nearly complete support for the new Dojo 1.7 mobile widget library With Dojo 1.7, there is now a complete collection of mobile widgets that provide native look&feel - mobile web widgets that look and act like native device controls. Maqetta Preview 2 supports nearly all of the Dojo 1.7 mobile widgets so that designers can do quick drag/drop assembly of mobile user interface. User interfaces can contain multiple "views" (or screens), with automatic slide-in/slide-out animations between the views. Authors can export their mobile UIs as a ZIP, upload to a Web site, and then the mobile UI mockups will run on target devices.
  • Device silhouettes are now pixel-perfect There have been numerous fixes and improvements to the Maqetta feature that allows authoring inside of an actual-size image of a mobile device (a "device silhouette"). With the preview release (Preview 1), the screen areas for the silhouettes were incorrectly sized. With Preview 2, the screen areas now have exactly correct sizes (e.g., iPhone interior is exactly 480x360 pixels).
  • Preview-in-browser now uses device silhouettes, with zoom control With the preview release, device silhouettes appeared in the page editor but did not appear if you clicked on the preview-in-browser icon. With Preview 2, preview-in-browser will render inside of the current device silhouette used by the Maqetta page editor. The previewer user interface provides a zoom control (using CSS3 transforms) so that grow or shrink the preview in order to: (a) zoom in/out so that the preview will be the same size as the target device, (b) zoom in to look more closely at certain UI components, (c) zoom out in case the whole user interface is too large for your display .
  • Mobile user interface authoring tutorial The documentation now includes a tutorial on authoring mobile user interfaces.
• Tutorial on exporting to developer tools such as Eclipse. Maqetta Preview 2 includes a new tutorial that explains how to export your Maqetta workspace as a ZIP file that can be subsequently uploaded to a web site or imported into developer tools such as Eclipse or Rational Application Developer.
• Usability improvements to Web-based review and commenting. We had a major usability issue with review and commenting with the Preview 1 release that we have addressed with the Preview 2 release. On Maqetta.org, when reviewers received an email invitation to participate in a review session, they would almost always have to login to Maqetta.org and often have to register as a new user. These login and register processes confused the application, which ultimately would take a reviewer into the page editor user interface instead of the review user interface. With Preview 2, reviewers will be taken to the review user interface even if they have to login and/or register.
  There are other various minor UI improvements around review and commenting, including an improved email invitation.
• Built-in themes (claro and sketch) are now read-only. With Preview 2, the two built-in themes (claro and sketch) are now read-only. If a user wants to make theme changes, they have to first clone one of the built-in themes into a custom theme. This enhancement prevents a user from damaging these built-in themes using the page editor or theme editor, and therefore a user can always recover back to the built-in themes.
• DataGrid can now read in data from a file (URL) in user workspace. With Preview 1, DataGrid accepted user-entered dummy data in the form of multiple rows of comma-separated information. With Preview 2, DataGrid can now pull its data from a JSON file from the user's workspace. (In a future release, we will add support for reading JSON from an arbitrary URL, but this requires cross-domain data access, which didn't make it into Preview 2.)
• Cache busting. Preview 2 includes "cache busting" logic that ensures that new releases of Maqetta will pull new versions of Maqetta JavaScript files automatically instead of possibly using the JavaScript files from earlier releases.
• Many bug fixes. Preview 2 includes over 180 miscellaneous bug fixes. Some of those fixes can be seen by going to this URL which lists bugs closed against the Preview 2 release.

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