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Maqetta Preview 5

Preview 5 release notes

The Preview 5 release includes the following updates:

• Review/commenting updates - The Preview 5 release includes various changes to Maqetta's 'review/commenting features:

  • Review/commenting support for mobile UIs - Previous releases of Maqetta only supported review/commenting on desktop UIs. Preview 5 now provides review/commenting support for mobile UIs, particularly:
    • Just like previous support for desktop UIs, the review/commenting feature presents a "live application" that the reviewer can actually run, with the only exception that the application is running inside of Maqetta, thereby allowing reviews to provide feedback on the mobile application prototype.
    • Mobile review/commenting provides deep support for Dojo Mobile "Views". A "View widget in Dojo usually corresponds to a different screen (aka "scene") of the mobile application.
    • Reviewers can cause "scene changes" (i.e., switch to a different View) either by clicking on interactive elements in the live application, or switching to a different scene by clicking on one of the Views that are listed in the Scenes palette.
    • Reviewers can post blog-style textual feedback comments (in the Comments palette) and/or annotate the live application with overlay graphical comments in the form of rectangles, ovals, arrows and text. With Maqetta review/commenting, review comments are tied to particular Views (i.e., scenes).
    • Mobile review/commenting takes place inside of the same mobile device silhouette that Maqetta provides a page authoring time and in its previewer.
  • Review/commenting now part of core application - In previous releases, the review/commenting feature was a separate application that ran in a separate browser window. This presented various usability issues in systems that required user registration and login. With Preview 5, review/commenting is now packaged as yet another editor type within the Maqetta application. With Preview 5, the types of editors include: (a) visual page editor for HTML files, (b) text editor for CSS, JavaScript and plain text files, (c) theme editors, (d) and now "review editors".

• Performance improvements, particularly network performance - Preview 5 includes the first significant attempt by the Maqetta team to improve application performance. With this release, there were major changes under the hood that (in many cases) greatly reduce the time that the Maqetta application waits for data from the server. The main reason for the performance improvements was moving the entire Maqetta applciation to the new Dojo 1.7 "loader" (called "AMD"). AMD provides (depending on the operation) anywhere between small speed improvement to (in selected cases) ~10x speed improvement. More performanbce improvements will be coming in future releases.

• New palette arrangement - Largely due to the integration of review/commenting into the main application (versus being a separate application), Preview 5 includes some rearrangement of its palettes. In particular:

  • Outline palette has moved to top/left
  • States palette has moved to bottom/right (and been renamed to "Scenes" - see below)
  • Reviews palette has moved to bottom/left
  • Comments palette has been added to the top/right

• States palette renamed to Scenes palette (in page and review editors) - In the page editor and review editor, the "States" palette has been renamed to the "Scenes" palette, mostly because that palette now also supports Dojo Mobile Views for mobile UIs (whereas desktop UIs support "application states"), so the term "scenes" represents the generalization of these two concepts.

  When one of the theme editors is open, that palette has the label "States" instead of "Scenes" because that palette shows widget interactive states such as Normal, Selected, Hover, etc.

• New HTML and Dojo widgets - Preview 5 adds support for the following widgets:

  • Dojo HorizontalSlider and VerticalSlider
  • HTML <audio>, <br>, <button>, <embed>, <fieldset>, <form>, <hr>, <input>, <p>, <select>, <textarea>, <video>

• Improved drag/drop with flowable content - The drag/drop cursor logic that appears when dragging a widget in "flow" mode (i.e., the widget is not positioned at an absolute (x,y) location) has been rewritten. The blinking vertical bar type-in cursor that appears during dragging now allows dropping widgets either before or after other widgets: if the mouse is over the left half of another widget, the dragged widget will be added before the other widget, otherwise after. Along the way, various flow-mode dragging bugs have been fixed. In particular, the "show candidate parents" feature works now in flow mode.

• Instructions for deploying Maqetta applications to PhoneGap - The Maqetta wiki at GitHub now includes a page that provides instructions for Deploying Maqetta projects to PhoneGap.

• Instructions for optimizing and deploying Maqetta applications - The Maqetta wiki at GitHub now includes a page that provides instructions for Optimizing and Deploying your Dojo based page. These instructions can greatly improve the runtime performance of Maqetta-created applications. Following these instructions allows your Maqetta mockups to have comparable performance to what your final deployed application will have (assuming your developers know how to optimize web apps!).

• Dojo 1.7.1 support - Preview 5 has updated to Dojo 1.7.1 release.

• Many other bug fixes - Preview 5 includes over 300 miscellaneous bug fixes. Some of those fixes can be seen by going to this URL which lists bugs closed against the Preview 5 release.

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