Hi Keith,

There is an action called "Other" where you can enter a description like "Generate Email" that will appear in the specification and show a popup in the prototype with the description. Does that work for you?

Just a few tiny things I would suggest adding to an already excellent product:

- Alt-drag an object to create a copy. I use this all the time in Adobe apps.

- Instead of always opening everything in a new tab, have the option to make the design window just deal with one thing at a time. I'm always ending up with tons of tabs as I flip between pages and have to Close All. For my work, I would generally stay in single page mode most of the time and only "open in new tab" when I specifically want to keep multiples open.

- When editing text, I would rather the Up and Down arrows jump to the start/end of the text rather than either do nothing or moving by character just like left/right (different parts of the app do both of these things). I think the start/end jump is pretty standard at this point.

- Personally I wish that creating a new or duplicate page would load it in the design window. I'm constantly duping a page and accidentally editing my original because I forgot to double-click the new page.

- Column spans in tables would be hugely helpful. Tab stops in text blocks would be nice too/instead but I think the tables would do the job and be easy to generate into HTML.

- Maybe it's just me, but it feels like the Enter key should often end an editing action rather than creating a second line of text. On the Mac (I'm using Parallels) the Return key next to the main letters is differentiated from the Enter key on the far right (or tucked at the bottom on laptops) and these are sometimes given different behaviors -- Photoshop uses Return for new line of text, Enter for Done. Not sure if this convention has been used on PC apps. Or maybe Shift-Enter for new lines in everything but text panels...

- I would love if the popup spec notes didn't require a close box to put away. That feels so clunky. Maybe just a click outside, or maybe they should act like rollovers. I wish I could control the affordance for the specification popups (mainly to make it smaller, less prominent). Actually I wonder if I can just find that image somewhere and replace it...

 Thanks for listening.

-- Marty

 

Thank you Marty

Ctrl+drag does the copy in Axure. We'll consider making that work for Alt+drag too.

You can change the images in the annotation popups in the prototype. There is a Resources folder in the prototype folder with the images and a axurerppage.css that can also be modified. If you want to change it for all prototypes, you can make the changes in the DefaultSettings\Prototype_Files\Resources folder in the directory where Axure RP is installed.

I've been using Axure for a couple months now and I do like it quite a bit. I do have a few suggestions for things that are kind of driving me nuts, they may be dupes since I don't have time to read through 8 pages of posts :/

 1. There's got to be basic text formatting available for a text panel. By that I mean line spacing and margins at the very least. I often get stuck duping lots of text panels to get what I need. 

2. The grid is horrible. The dots make me near blind. I want the option to make the grid lines and not dots, and then to set the color of the lines dot's to whatever I like as well as the opacity. It also needs to be tied to a key command. 

3. In fact, adding the ability to have custom key commands would be great.

4. Guides! You have rules, let me drag some guides out.

Really great product, looking forward to the next update... and when exactly might that be? :)

Thanks for the requests. You can change the grid dots to lines or remove them by using Wireframe->Grid. There will likely be a minor update in the next couple months and then a beta for a larger release planned for early next year.

Did somebody mention Photoshop-like layers already? Axure should have similar layers, with show/hide, delete and duplicate options.

Currently, it is most time-consuming to select an element that is below other elements.

Hi Victor,

Thanks for the reply - I frequently use the Other action however I need to give specifics of the email output (HTML/plain text, fields to include, where in DB to pull information from, variables that are passed from the form itself etc.) and specifying these details is impossible from the Other action input box.  At the very least I'd need to attach a separate spec document (although I guess I could design another page in Axure...).

dswalef:

Did somebody mention Photoshop-like layers already? Axure should have similar layers, with show/hide, delete and duplicate options.

Currently, it is most time-consuming to select an element that is below other elements.

My vote also goes to this. I am using the trial atm and am hoping to justify some company spend on it but these couple of issues are really the biggest time waster along with things like align and by align I mean more than just top middle and bottom.

What I would like to see in my quick play with the app is:

1. Some sort of Layers palette to help with the stacking order and visibility problems (Biggest slowdown)
   
2. Preferences for the work area to set certain size to help with positioning and aligning
3. Real guides that we can drag out onto the work area with the ability to turn on or off and lock
4. Smart guides along the lines of Apple's XCode or Fireworks CS4 beta (http://www.adobe.com/devnet/logged_in/rjones_fwcs4_beta.html) to help with placement of the widgets.
   
5. Improved aligns which allow you to align multiple widgets or widgets to the "work area".
6. The ability to distribute objects a certain dimension apart.
   
7. Control over the "work area" color and grid look and feel. I find the dots painful to look at for long periods of time and the lines are way to dark and just make the page look busy. I would also prefer not to have a #FFFFFF white background.
   
8. Renaming text on items should be just double clicking on it to put into an editable state, not clicking the edit button that is currently required
9. The dimensions palette should be non modal and always available to tweak things quickly.
10. Be able to set the diagram wide settings for things like fonts. i.e. I would like to have 10px Calibri as my base font on all widgets created.
11. Sizes of widgets should be of the contents size and not the size of the handles around it. i.e. Images are not the size specified there is a couple of pixel gap around them.
12. Maybe some masters that can be shared across documents. Seems to get any customization in you need to use the masters but they seem to be only document specific.
13. Rounded corner radius sizes in sizes (e.g. pixels, %, em) (Wouldn't it be great if IE/Trident caught up to the rest of the game on this lil one)
14. Be able to template/brand the working prototype easily, i.e. change basic colours, add a logo etc, product and marketing groups LOVE to see their brand Identity over EVERYTHING :-/
15. Did the Layers thing get mentioned??? :)
    

I am sure I'll think of more things as I start using it a little deeper but this are the things that jump out at me. I am enjoying my time so far using Axure and believe that it would not take much more for this app to be a no-brainer. At this point intime I want to do a bit more over the next couple of days but hope to present to some others in the group to get opinions on to buy or not.

Also wondering from those that have been using for a while how frequent new versions are and how much they feel community concerns are addressed?

More things on the wishlist:

1. Would like to be able to set the position of groups. Currently this cannot be done.
   
2. A direct selection tool so that I can select an item by itself that is currently in a group.
3. Button shapes to have a selected state to make things like segmented buttons and tabs a breeze
   

Thanks for all the requests.

1. We're working on a dynamic panel manager to be able to hide / show / open states easier. Are you finding that most of the stacking issues are around dynamic panel usage?

8. You should be able to double-click to edit the text on a widget. Are you referring to the page and master names? Those require a slow double-click like in Windows Explorer.

10. You can change default styles for widgets using the Style Editor (Wireframe->Style Editor) so you can make all text panels be Calibri 10pt by default. (Note: fonts are in points right now)

Most of these requests are very much aligned with features we have been considering for future releases which is great. We have historically done feature releases about every 4 to 6 months.

victor:

Thanks for all the requests.

1. We're working on a dynamic panel manager to be able to hide / show / open states easier. Are you finding that most of the stacking issues are around dynamic panel usage?

8. You should be able to double-click to edit the text on a widget. Are you referring to the page and master names? Those require a slow double-click like in Windows Explorer.

10. You can change default styles for widgets using the Style Editor (Wireframe->Style Editor) so you can make all text panels be Calibri 10pt by default. (Note: fonts are in points right now)

Most of these requests are very much aligned with features we have been considering for future releases which is great. We have historically done feature releases about every 4 to 6 months.

 

1. Yep definitely most problems around dynamic panels, and I guess that just due to the nature they they are normally a stacked element.I would hope that the stacking solution you come up with worked on more than the dynamic panels alone.

8. I have the issue in the Dynamic Panel State Manager. but I guess the reason I thought it was not working across the board is that it seems to require a slower double click than I am used to. Is it working off some OS setting or is it a hard coded value you guys are setting?maybe in the panel state manager each state should have an edit stat icon/button/text next to it rather than that once central one that you have to find amongst the other 7 buttons.

10. Yup I finally found that one, and noticed that my 11px (or so I thought) Calibri looked a lil large :) It'd be nicer if the user could choose their measurements, ie px, pt, em, % etc.. for all items. Maybe the grid and Style editor should be rolled up into a single Preferences pane. The other thing I noticed there is that when I made a custom style I couldn't find how to then access it, but later found it in the top toolbar.Wasn't really where I was expecting to find it.

8. Editing dynamic panel state names does require selecting the state and clicking Rename. Thanks for the suggestion to make that simpler. The slow double click on the sitemap and master list uses system settings. I'm not sure why it seems slower.

 

Being able to choose where on the bounding box the annotation can be placed would be a nice touch too. I think I would prefer to have the annotations top left rather than top right as an example.

I’ve been using Axure for about 6 months now.  It’s really a great product, a very solid alternative to Visio.  Here is my list of suggestions/improvements for future releases.  I apologize for any repeats, but hopefully they will help to emphasize the demand :)

1.    Ability to add annotations to grouped objects and instances of a master  
2.    Tables that auto grow and shrink with text. It would also be nice to be able to insert widgets into tables.  
3.    Masters that can be saved as widgets so that they are available in all projects without having to import them.
4.    Ability to edit the onPageLoad variable of multiple pages at once or child pages that inherit the onPageLoad variable of their parent page.  
5.    Adjustable text position on connector lines  
6.    Annotation views that can be used across projects  
7.    Automatically assign an index number to new pages and make it available as a variable.
8.    Background template pages as in Visio where objects are locked into position and not selectable.  
9.    Bulleted text lists  
10.    Ability to edit the location of multiple selected objects  
11.    Connector arrows that stay attached to shapes and stretch instead of detaching when you move them.  It’s really annoying when you select a group of flow shapes to move and you have to deselect the connectors that are attached to shapes you don’t want to move so that they don’t become detached.
12.    Ability to auto generate a sitemap flow from an Excel file.  There is a way to do this in Visio.
13.    Auto numbering of screenshots in specification document.
14.    Ability to optimize multiple selected images or all images on page at once.  
15.    Rotatable shape widgets.  
16.    Rounded box shape widgets with adjustable corner curvature.  
17.    Ability to display annotations with headers in the specification document instead of inside a table
18.    Shapes that auto connect to a connector if dragged over it.  
19.    A “Date Saved” variable
20.    For pages with dynamic panels, somehow the ability to specify which states to display when generating the spec doc.

Thanks Axure team. Keep up the great work!

 -Jason

Thanks Jason.

For 8, could you try to right click on a master in the Master pane and select Behavior->Place In Background? Then add the master to a page. You can also select a master already on a page, right click, and select Edit Master->Place in Background.