Maqetta 8 Release Notes
The Maqetta 8 release includes the following updates:
Widget Palette Makeover -
The Widget Palette (the "Palette") at the top left of Maqetta's visual page designer has been redesigned with Release 8. Some highlights:
- Folders and subfolders -
The Widget Palette now supports two levels of widget groupings - top level folders
(e.g., Containers, Controls, Clip Art), and some folders have subfolders.
For example, the Controls folder has various subfolders (e.g., Butttons, Sliders/Spinners, TextBoxes, etc).
This solves a problem with previous Maqetta releases where some of the
sections of the Widget Palette had as many as 50 different widgets within the section,
which made it difficult to find the widget you needed for a particular task.
- Large-size widget icons -
With Release 8, the Widget Palette includes newly designed, large-size widget icons (50x50),
arranged left-to-right, top-to-bottom within a particular section of the widget palette.
The larger size icons allow greater graphical hints about the given widget's capabilities.
- Different list of "suggested widgets" for different composition types
(mobile, desktop, sketch) -
With previous releases, the same set of widgets appeared for all composition types
(mobile, desktop, or sketch), with the desktop widgets listed at the top.
This older one-size-fits-all widget list made it difficult for mobile developers
to find the mobile widgets they needed, and made it difficult for users who
wanted to do quick sketching to find the Drawing Tools and Clip Art widgets.
With Release 8, when you choose a particular
composition type from the Create menu (e.g., mobile application vs sketch hi-fidelity),
the Widget Palette will now show a list of categories and widgets that are appropriate
to the composition type you have chosen. For example, for mobile applications,
the topmost sections show the mobile widgets that users most commonly use when building
mobile applications. Similarly, for desktop applications, the topmost sections show the desktop
widgets that users typically use for desktop applications. For sketching, the topmost sections
are Drawing Tools and Clip Art.
- Redundant/overlapping widgets collapsed into a single icon -
Previously, if different widget libraries (e.g., Dojo desktop, Dojo mobile, HTML) provided similar
widgets (e.g., each of these libraries provides a "Button" widget), the Maqetta widget palette
would show each variation of that widget as a separate choice in the palette.
With Release 8, the variations are all collapsed
into a single widget icon (e.g., a "Button" widget). If a given widget icon represents
multiple alternate widgets, the widget icon will show a gray circle with a caret symbol at the
top-right. The user can click on the caret symbol to bring up a popup which allows him
to switch to one of alternate widgets instead of the default choice for that particular widget category.
For example, for desktop applications, the default "Button" is the Dojo desktop button widget
(from the Dijit library), and one of the alternates is the HTML button widget.
- Help information and tooltip for each widget -
Each widget icon in the Widget Palette contains a small gray ? icon at its lower right.
Clicking on the ? icon will bring up a popup that displays explanatory information
about the widget, usually a summary and sometimes a longer description.
Each widget also has a hover tooltip that displays when you hover the mouse
over the widget icon. The hover tooltip displays the widget's name and
the widget library which defines this particular widget. If the given widget icon
represents more than one underlying widget (for example, a Dojo button and an HTML button),
then the hover tooltip lists the alternate versions.
- Suggested widgets versus All widgets -
The new Widget Palette has a dropdown menu at the top right (next to the filter field)
which has two options: "Suggested widgets" (the default) and "All widgets".
With Suggested widgets, Maqetta only shows widgets that apply to the current composition
type. For example, if the current file is a mobile application, the suggested widgets
will include all of the mobile widgets from Dojo and exclude the desktop widgets.
(Vice versa for desktop applications). If you are developing a mobile application and
want to use a desktop widget, then choose "All widgets" and the palette will reconstitute
itself to show both mobile and desktop widgets (along with HTML, Drawing Tools and Clip Art).
Site-specific configuration options -
Release 8 includes customization hooks that enable specific installations to
customize aspects of the Maqetta user interface. The customizations are defined
by JSON files that can be included in the siteConfig/ folder for a particular installation.
Configuration options allow command-line definition of the location of the siteConfig/ folder
This release includes support for the following two configuration options:
- Default CSS themes (desktop and mobile) -
The defaultTheme.json file in the siteConfig/ folder specifies the default
themes for desktop applications and each of the different mobile platforms
supported by Dojo 1.8 (Android, Blackberry, iPad, iPhone and custom/other).
- Widget Palette -
The widgetPalette.json file in the siteConfig/ folder specifies the various
sections and subsections in the Widget Palette, and which widgets should be
included in which section.
Other -
- Update to Dojo 1.8.1 -
Release 8 now ships with Dojo 1.8.1.
- Mobile previews now show direct URL -
A new field has been added to the mobile previewer which shows the direct URL
for the mobile application that is showing in the previewer.
You can then type this direct URL into your mobile device to run your
application on the given device.
- Fixes for Surround with when in sketch mode -
In previous releases, if you were in sketch mode (i.e., absolute positioning),
and you selected one or more widgets, and then issued a "Surround with" command
(Surround with <div>, <span> or <a>), the new container element
ended up at the top/left of the canvas. With Release 8, the new container element
is correctly sized and positioned to exactly surround the widgets that had been selected.
Also, the selection changes at the end of the operation such that the new
container element is selected.
- Bug fixes -
Release 8 includes 150+ bug fixes. Some of those fixes
can be seen by going to
this URL which lists bugs closed against Release 8.
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