Design Library and Axure convergence

[bongwater]

I was fortunate enough to be shown an early (private) Beta of Axure
5.5 last night and was able to play around with it for c. 20 minutes
or so.

I call it the "widget" release. There's lots of stuff that make the
creation of and management of custom widget libraries useful.

Things I've seen in the Beta (not necessarily what will make it into
final release but worth mentioning):

1) the ability to create and manage custom widget libraries. the
feature is akin to Visio's stencils.
2) the ability to have multiple widget libraries available at once.
3) the ability to search for widgets by name and filter results.
4) the ellipse object has been exposed as a standard button type so
round buttons are now possible.
5) the ability to set styles for different custom widget states -
e.g., selected, disabled, etc. and you have full control over text
styling, fills, colors, line thickness.
6) a new selection method - you can now opt to change how Axure
selects groups of widgets so that only widgets that intersect will
actually be selected - this reduces cases of accidental selection of
objects.
7) rounded rectangles and the like have some degree of control over
the radius of corners - you can't manually specify a radius but it can
be done visually.
8) there's an interesting feature called "preserve corners", which
allows rectangular bitmaps that get imported (such as browser windows
and dialog boxes) to be scaled proportionately.
9) complex interactions using dynamic panels just got much easier!
finally, there's a new manager panel that allows for easy state
management using a folder like structure.
10) the days of pressing Ctrl+L are over - the location and size
feature can now be made to appear as a floating modal for quick and
easy access.

Missing:

1) the ability to rotate widgets by fixed or arbitrary angles
2) finer control over fills (e.g., like a swatch for fills)
3) no ability to add drop shadows to widgets without "rolling your
own"

Some of this might make in into the next release but what I've seen so
far looks quite promising.

[Luke Perman]

Thanks for sharing your experiences. I haven't had a chance to load it
up yet... hopefully tomorrow!