Maqetta 7 Release Notes
The Maqetta 7 release includes the following updates:
User Interface Makeover -
The Maqetta user interface has had a major makeover with Release 7, with countless UI tweaks. Some highlights:
- Graphics redesign -
With Release, 7, nearly all of the major user interface components have new visual styling.
There is new visual styling on the topmost banner (and its icons and menus), the file tabs,
the toolbar, and the various palettes on the left and right side of the application.
- Redesigned, collapsable palettes on left and right side of user interface -
Release 7 provides redesigned palettes on the left and right side of the application.
The palettes can be collapsed easily to maximize the size of the editing canvas.
- Streamlined user interface for creating HTML files -
Previously, to create a new HTML file, we presented a dialog where you had to pick
a composition type (e.g., desktop hi-fi page vs desktop lo-fi sketch).
With Release 7, the Create menu now includes an easier-to-understand list of
common user operations (Mobile Application, Desktop Application, Sketch, etc.),
and users can start editing new documents faster.
- Redesigned and streamlined toolbar -
The toolbar has been redesigned so that common operations can be discovered
and used more quickly. Whereas in previous releases, some commands were only
available on the page editor's context menu, with Release 7 all page editor
commands also are available from the toolbar.
- New welcome page -
Release 7 includes a newly designed welcome page, with buttons at the top
for common "New" actions (e.g., New Mobile Application), and buttons at the bottom
for getting started information (e.g., tutorials and videos).
- New login and registration screens - Login and registration screens have
similar visual styling to the main Maqetta application.
Performance improvements -
Release 7 includes performance improvements in several areas. In particular:
- Page editor speedups -
Release 7 includes several performance improvements,
particularly around opening HTML files and increased snappiness
when users add new widgets to the page. Under the hood, among the key changes
were changing synchronous web requests to asynchronous and using optimized versions
of widget JavaScript files.
- Outline palette speedups -
The underlying code for the Outline palette has been rewritten,
resulting in considerably fewer full redraws of that palette as the document changes.
- Zazl option to improve performance with preview-in-browser -
Release 7 integrates the
Zazl
open source technology into Maqetta's preview-in-browser feature. When enabled,
whenever a user clicks on the preview-in-browser button, Maqetta will run the
Zazl Optimizer on the server to optimize (concatenate and minify) Javascript
on the user's HTML page on demand. This will minimize network requests and download sizes
when viewing that page directly in the web browser, improving performance, particularly on network
connections with high latency. Zazl does take some elapsed time to perform this task,
but results are cached and shared, so subsequent page loads should be even faster for a given set of widgets.
With Release 7, Zazl is an experimental feature which must be enabled in the Preferences Dialog
on the Settings menu at the top-right of the top toolbar. It does not yet work with all Maqetta features
such as JSONP data or custom widgets. The goal is to enable Zazl by default in an upcoming release.
Eclipse Orion integration -
Mostly under the hood, Release 7 includes major changes to more completely integrate
Maqetta with the Eclipse Orion open source project.
Most users won't notice these changes, but nevertheless they represent some of the
most significant Release 7 code changes. Some notes on these changes:
- "Open Orion Navigator" -
Release 7 adds a new command to the Open menu, "Open Orion Navigator", which
opens a new browser window that launches the Eclipse Orion cloud-based source development tools,
where you can perform source editing in the cloud on the various files within your Maqetta workspace.
- Back-end changes to use Orion for user and workspace management -
With Release 7, we have replaced most of the old logic for user management and workspace management
with Orion code that provided similar services. These back-end changes improve the robustness
and completeness of the Maqetta server, provides additional functionality, and
improves long-term maintenance and code sharing between the Maqetta and Eclipse Orion projects.
- Long-term strategic benefits -
The Eclipse Orion team has implemented (or is pursuring for future releases)
several features that will benefit Maqetta users. By using Eclipse Orion code for Maqetta's
user management and workspace management, Maqetta users will get many features
"for free" as future versions of Maqetta upgrade to future releases of Orion.
HTML table enhancements -
With Release 7, we have added multiple user interface improvements
around using HTML tables. HTML tables can be highly useful not only
to display information in a tabular format, but also is one option for
achieving tabular layout of user interface components, such as name/address forms
which have labels on the left and text fields on the right.
HTML table enhancements include:
- Table dialog at table creation time (and subsequent editing) -
With Release 7, when a user adds an HTML table to the page,
he is presented with a dialog that allows the user to chooose the following options:
- Number of rows
- Number of columns
- Border thickness (0 means no border)
- 'border-collapse' property value (default is 'collapse')
- 'table-layout' property value (default is 'fixed')
- Checkbox for whether first row should be a header row (i.e., use TH elements instead of TD elements)
- Column operations -
Users can select a table column either by selecting a table cell and then issuing
the "Select column" command (found on the "Table commands" icon on the toolbar and
on the context menu). When a column is selected, the user can:
- Set the 'width' property or background properties in the Properties palette.
Under the hood, in the HTML source code that corresponds to the table,
these CSS properties will be attached to the
<col> element
corresponding to the given column.
- Users can change column widths by interactively pulling on the blue circular nobs that appear on the left and right
side of the selection chrome when a table column is selected.
Tree widget enhancements -
With Release 7, we have greatly enhanced the dialog that appears when
creating or editing a Tree widget. This dialog allows users to:
- Specify custom icons on individual tree nodes.
For container tree nodes, users can specify both a closed and open icon.
- Actions to take for each of these events:
- click
- double-click
- open
- close
- Ability to reorder tree nodes via simple drag/drop.
- Use toolbar buttons to insert new tree nodes, remove tree nodes, move tree nodes up and down in the list,
and control indentation levels on particular tree nodes.
Upgrade to Dojo 1.8, more mobile widgets -
Release 7 supports the latest release of Dojo (version 1.8) and includes
support for a number of new Dojo Mobile widgets. New mobile widgets include:
- Slider
- SearchBox
- ContentPane
- Container
- Pane
- ScrollablePane
- Accordion
- GridLayout
- IconMenu
- IconMenuItem
- ProgressIndicator
- DataCarousel
- DataCarousel
- ValuePicker
- ValuePickerSlot
- ValuePickerDatePicker
- ValuePickerTimePicker
- DatePicker
- TimePicker
Save As Widget -
With Release 7, we have added a "Save As Widget" command on the dropdown menu next to the Save button
on the toolbar. This command will create a re-usable widget out of the currently selected widget,
and add a new widget into a "User Widgets" section of the widgets palette. This feature allows
a Maqetta user to create custom re-usable components that he needs to use in multiple places
within his user interfaces.
Enhancements and improvements to applications states feature -
Release 7 includes many fixes and improvements to the applications states feature:
- Application states can be used with mobile UIs -
In previous releases, application states were designed to only work
with desktop user interfaces. In fact, the Maqetta user interface tried to hide the
application states feature when device silhouettes were visible.
Now with Release 7,
it is possible to use applications states with mobile UIs.
- Ability to change the name of an application state -
The Scenes palette includes a 3rd "modify state" icon that allows
you to change the name of an application state.
- Ability to choose an initial state -
In previous releases, when running
your application (e.g., preview in browser), the page always began in the "Normal" state.
With Release 7, the "modify state" icon (see previous bullet) brings up a dialog
that includes a checkbox that allows the Maqetta user to say that a particular
state should be the initial state at runtime for his application.
Shortcut keys for common operations -
We have implemented some short-cut keys for common operations. Here is a partial list
(refer to the documentation for an updated and complete list):
- Ctrl-z: undo (Cmd-z on Mac)
- Ctrl-Shift-z: redo (Cmd-Shift-z on Mac)
- Ctrl-x: cut (Cmd-x on Mac)
- Ctrl-c: copy (Cmd-c on Mac)
- Ctrl-v: paste (Cmd-v on Mac)
- DEL or BS: delete
- Ctrl-s: save (Cmd-s on Mac)
- Ctrl-Shift-s: saveAs (Cmd-Shift-s on Mac)
- Ctrl-o: open file (Cmd-o on Mac)
- Ctrl-0: preview in browser (Cmd-0 on Mac)
- Ctrl-1: design view (Cmd-1 on Mac)
- Ctrl-2: source view (Cmd-3 on Mac)
- Ctrl-3: split vertically view (Cmd-3 on Mac)
- Ctrl-4: split horizontally view (Cmd-4 on Mac)
- F1: open new window showing Maqetta documentation
Revamped online documentation -
The documentation set has been reorganized and streamlined.
In particular, Release 7 includes a set of "cheat sheets"
(interactive quick reference guides) focused on various aspects of the Maqetta user interface.
Other -
- Ability to control which mobile views appear at page startup -
For Dojo mobile view widgets, the 'selected' property under the "Widget" section can be
checked or unchecked to control which view widget is visible initially when the
your mobile application first comes up.
- No longer using port 55556 -
We integrated NGINX into the Maqetta server, which allowed us to run the Maqetta application
on port 80 at http://app.maqetta.org/maqetta (vs http://maqetta.org:55556/maqetta).
- Removal of experimental (untested) widgets -
Previous releases included experimental, partial support for various widgets
under the widget categories "Untested Dojo & HTML", jQuery and YUI. With Release 7,
the product only includes supported widgets and no longer shows any of the experimental
or proof-of-concept widgets. We have plans to include full support for many of the
experimental widgets in future releases.
- Allows dojox.mvc in HTML source code -
dojox.mvc is a package of technology in Dojo 1.8 that allows bi-directional
data binding between a client-side JSON store and widgets on the page.
While Release 7 does not offer visual authoring support for dojox.mvc
(Dojo 1.8 data binding), our testing indicates that users can enter dojox.mvc
markup into their Maqetta pages while using the Maqetta page editor
to build their user interface.
- Various widget selection bugs fixed -
In previous releases, when the currently selected widget was at the edge of the page,
the widget selection box around the widget would be pulled into the user page,
with the result that the widget selection box was not accurate. With Release 7,
selection logic has been rewritten and this problem no longer exists.
Also, there were several fixes around selection boxes being in the wrong place
when the page or container widgets were scrolled.
- GridX upgrade -
Support for GridX was introduced in Release 6 with an early version of the
GridX code base. For Release 7, we have upgraded to GridX 1.0.
- Many bug fixes -
Release 7 includes 750+ bug fixes. Some of those fixes
can be seen by going to
this URL which lists bugs closed against Release 7.
Migration of User Workspaces
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