It happens to me all the time!

The usual way to do this involves creating (or finding) a bit of space somewhere, moving one bunch of elements and controls into the space, shuffling all the other elements around and then closing up the space again. It can be a bit of a hassle sometimes.

Even a simple task of exchanging the positions of two elements can be fiddly when you need to get them properly aligned in their new places and they’re in each other’s way.

So we created the “Swap Element Positions” feature in GUI Design Studio v3.1 to address this common need and save a ton of time and fiddling about.

It’s easiest to demonstrate with this contrived dialog example but the technique is equally suitable for panels and icons in toolbars, on Web pages and anywhere else you need to quickly re-arrange things.

To swap the Middle and Bottom control groups, the 2 Group Boxes are selected (in any order) and after applying the “Swap Element Positions” command (Alt+S), this is what happens:

All of the control elements within the groups have also been moved. Crucially, though, the positions of the Group Boxes themselves have been adjusted to take account of the difference in heights of the groups. Job done in two steps and about 3 seconds!

But what happens to the Middle group when we want to swap the Top and Bottom groups?

As you can see, the groups have all been correctly re-arranged to take account of all the height differences and what lies between the elements being swapped. The same rules apply for horizontal re-arrangement and combinations of the two.

In some cases, you might need to use the feature a few times to ‘bubble-sort’ your elements for the ordering you need but even this will be much faster than manual re-arrangement.

It won’t solve every case but it’s a very handy tool to have at your side and, if things do go wrong, there’s always the Undo command that will leave you no worse off than having to do it manually anyway.

Let us know how you get on with the “Swap Element Positions” feature and if you find cases that don’t work for you, send them to support and we’ll see if we can improve the feature.

You may have noticed our new Website redesign and, while we’ve been planning a lot of new product developments, we’ve realised that we didn’t release nearly enough versions of GUI Design Studio in the year as we’d intended. we aim to fix that!

So we’re taking a different approach for 2009. Our new plan is to make a new release of GUI Design Studio roughly once every month so that you can benefit from all the latest updates sooner or upgrade whenever it’s convenient.

With this new, incremental development plan, you’ll be seeing regular small improvements with major new features thrown in, every once in a while, as they get completed.

I don’t want to reveal too much detail at this stage about the biggest new features we have planned (you’ll find out about them in due course) but, to give you a taster, here’s a few of the things we’ll be looking at:

• The interactive capabilities of the prototypes will be expanded in a big way, including better support for business logic with enhanced scenarios. So many of you have been requesting this. It’s a very exciting feature and will let you explore a much wider range of designs with much less effort.
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• There’ll be further export and documentation options to give you the flexibility you’ve been asking for and helping you take designs to the next stage.
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• Better layout tools will help you make adjustments more easily, mockup interfaces even faster and provide further prototyping capabilities.
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• We want to increase your productivity with new features and support to help get you started on projects and designs faster. One part of this will be the long-awaited release of a series of training videos. Another part will be the release of user interface design pattern libraries that will demonstrate good practices and get you started more quickly and easily. We’ve been talking to customers about these for over two years so you’ll be glad to know we’re finally getting on with them!
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Our goal has always been to ‘help you produce software that better meets users’ needs’. Keep sending us your suggestions and feedback to let us know what’s really important to you and help shape the tool for everyone.

We’ll certainly be keeping busy in 2009 and we wish you a very happy and productive year!

You can now gain early access to 3.0 through our Beta Program but first, here’s a few details about the new version:

• With version 3.0, GUI Design Studio has now fully embraced Windows Vista. It was already Vista compatible but all of the elements have now been re-styled to provide the Vista look and feel in addition to the existing XP, NT (Classic) and Outline styles.

  

  These are not separate elements, of course. You can change the style at any time to see what your designs will look like on different Windows platforms or to show an “unfinished mockup” look for review purposes.

• We’ve had so many requests from customers for Ribbon Bar elements that we’ve added full support for this type of interface. Now you can create designs that follow the Microsoft Office 2007 style or just experiment to see what works best for your application by comparing a Ribbon Bar design with a more traditional menus and toolbars design.

  Here’s a sneak peak at a Ribbon Bar design created in Beta 2 (available soon):

  

• For Web Application designs we’ve added a new feature to make rollover effects easy. Although rollovers were possible before, it was tricky to get them right and maintain the correct navigation behaviour. Now they’re simple to do and very flexible. This will be available soon in Beta 2.

• If you’ve struggled to get tabbed interfaces to simulate properly in earlier versions of GUI Design Studio or just found them tricky then you’ll like the changes in version 3.0. We’ve listened to all of the feedback from customers and now made them really simple to create.

• These are just a few of the 20+ enhancements and fixes in the new version.

Upgrades

If you’re a customer wondering about upgrading from your current version or if you need to purchase GUI Design Studio before the new release becomes available then don’t worry because version 3.0 will be a free upgrade for all customers.

About the beta program…

We’re currently putting the finishing touches onto version 3.0 and although the feature list has been nailed down now, there’s still time to influence the final release.

If you’d like to get an early peak at version 3.0 and provide us with feedback to ensure we’ve covered everything we need to, then you’ll want to get on the beta program now.

With thousands of users, we won’t be able to accept everyone so places will be limited. Act now to secure your place and click this link to join the Beta Program!

We look forward to hearing from you.

Each featured design is described with a video walkthough of the prototype in action so you can see how the different features can help you with your designs. We decided to keep the videos silent (for now) because we know how annoying audio can be in an office environment.

The project file for each design is also available for download so you can try out the prototype for yourself and have a look at how the individual design files have been put together. You’ll need the free GUI Design Viewer application for that and there’s a handy download link for it on every page of the Gallery.

Take a look now by visiting http://www.carettasoftware.com/gallery/ and let us know what you think.

Instead of putting up lots of static screenshots, we’re going to experiment with video clips to show what each design prototype can do.

There’ll also be full descriptions and download links for the design files so that you can try out the prototypes for yourself using the free GUI Design Viewer.