Maqetta 9 Release Notes

The Maqetta 9 release includes the following updates:

• Several new tutorials - Release 9 now several new tutorials. The learning materials for Maqetta are now reasonably comprehensive.

• LDAP integration option - Release 9 provides hooks so that intranet installations of Maqetta can integrate with a company's LDAP-based user authentication system. Site administrators who wish to integrate their custom deployment of Maqetta with their LDAP should customize the maqetta.conf file within the Maqetta distribution and search for the "LDAP" options in that file.

• WAR file so Maqetta can be deployed on Tomcat - Release 9 now includes a WAR version of Maqetta so that Maqetta can be integrated with application servers such as Tomcat.

• Application States enhancements in Scenes Palette - Release 9 adds three new icons to the Scenes palette which provide additional productivity features when working with Maqetta's application states feature:

  • Manage widget visibility icon - (Active only when there is at least one selected widget) This icon brings up the Manage Widget Visibility dialog, which allows you to see at a glance in which application states the current selected widgets are visible, and allows you to change the visibility of the given widgets in each of the application states. Additional notes:
    • The dialog will indicate (via a text note) whether widgets that are visible within a particular custom state are the result of being visible in the Background state and therefore "shining through" to the given custom state.
    • The dialog includes a "Background only" button which will push all selected widgets to the Background so that they will be visible in all states.
  • New widgets to current state toggle icon - This toggle icon controls whether new widgets will be added to the Background state (and therefore will "shine through" and be visible in all application states) or will be added to the current application state (assuming Background is not the current state). The first time you run Maqetta, the icon is initialized to Background state. When you change this icon, that value will be in place until you change it again (including across sessions).
    NOTE: Be careful monitoring the current value of this icon so that new widgets get added to the state(s) in which you want those widgets to be visible.)
  • Highlight background wigets - (Effect of this toggle icon is visible only when a custom application state is active) This toggle icon controls whether to highlight widgets that are visible in the Background state and therefore "shine through" and are therefore also visible in the current application state. Widgets that are shining through from the Background will be highlighted with a light red border and light red interior.

• Rectangles and Circle widgets can now contain child content - In previous releases, the Rectangle, RoundedRectangle and Circle widgets (found in the "Drawing Tools" section of the widget palette) were primitive widgets, and therefore could not contain child widgets. With Release 9, those three widgets now act as containers. Now, if you add a Rectangle (or RoundedRect or Circle) to the canvas, and then add other widgets such that the drop point for the new widgets are inside the bounds of the Rectangle, then those widgets will be children of the Rectangle. This makes sketching with Rectangles, RoundedRectangles and Circle behave the same as sketching with other similar widgets (e.g., HTML <div>) and this nesting feature makes it more convenient to copy/paste and manage visibility of the container (with all of its children) rather than having to perform operations on many different primitive widgets.

• Events palette now includes easy drop-down for switching to different HTML page - In previous releases, the drop-down menu next to all of the events on the Events palette (onclick, ondblclick, etc) only showed the list of application states in the document. With Release 9, the menu has been enhanced to also show the list of HTML files in your current project. If you use the menu to choose one of the HTML files as the event value, then at runtime the given action (e.g., onclick) will cause the browser to switch to the given HTML page. (Accomplished under the hood via the following JavaScript logic: location.href='<newhtmlefilename>';.

• States operations are now undoable - In previous releases, some application states operations (e.g., remove state) were not undoable. With Release 9, all state operations are undoable.

• Download commands now only download selected files - In previous releases, the Download command on the Files palette context menu and the "Download selected" icon on the Files palette toolbar would bring up the same dialog as the "Download Entire Project" icon. With Release 9, the context menu command and the "Download selected icon" only download the files that are currently selected.

• Fixes for the experimental ZAZL option - Maqetta includes a feature where, using a preference, you can turn on the ZAZL option to cause certain operations (e.g., preview-in-browser) to use ZAZL technology to compile the runtime files before the preview operation happens. One of the fixes was to allow ZAZL to work with review/commenting. Note that ZAZL tends to make the first operation a little slower, but subsequent operations sometimes speed up substantially.

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