Blog

As a business analyst I am making prototypes for the a new project in Appery.io.  Like many other projects, this one has a public and admin parts.  I created a prototype for the public portion of the application, implying that this functionality would be available for all logged in users, however the customer corrected me and noted that it would be available for admin users only.  I have two Appery.io projects: admin part and public part of the site so I tried to just copy from “public” part and paste to admin part with no luck!  I got puzzled and wondered how I could do that. Here is the solution I would like to share.

The solution is quite simple.

1. Open the project where you have the screen that you want to move to another project.

2. Navigate to Project>Clipboard Import/Export menu to open the Local Import/Export dialog. In the dialog click Export.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week we pushed Appery.io version 1.2.4. Besides bug fixing, we added a new mobile control: Collapsible Block. You can place any other controls inside and the block is collapsible in design as well as in Web Preview. See how it actually looks in a browser (try to expand/collapse the block).

Let’s say you start with a prototype and drag and drop a number of controls on to a screen:

Now you need to align all controls. One way is to take each control and align it, but that’s too much work. In Appery.io, you can quickly align any number of controls. With the mouse select the controls and then select Align from the menu at the top and pick your option:

Selecting Align Right:

After a major 1.2 release which included mobile palette based on jQuery Mobile components, we pushed a minor 1.2.2 update mostly with bug fixing and other improvements. One important update in 1.2.2 is that collaboration now works behind any firewall. Before this release, Appery.io used a port other than 80 for collaboration. We heard from users who are behind a firewall that collaboration just didn’t work for them. We updated Appery.io collaboration to work with port 80 so now everyone will have this feature working. Give it a try and let us know what you think.

We just released Appery.io version 1.2.1 and the biggest new feature is mobile palette which lets you build mobile prototypes and of course preview them. Mobile controls are based on jQuery Mobile. Other new features are reorder screens with drag and drop, preserve ratio for uploaded images, round corners for components and component duplicate option.

To see the entire list of features, just go to https://appery.io. For any questions, suggestions and feedback, go to Appery.io forum. Let’s review all the new features in this release.

Mobile palette and prototypes

With mobile palette based on jQuery Mobile controls, you can now create prototypes for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry or any other mobile device and preview them in any browser (of course we recommend a mobile browser). To activate the mobile palette, switch Screen Type to Mobile in screen properties and get jQuery Mobile based controls:

Use the grid control to help you with layout and don’t forget that you can always preview the mobile prototype by selecting Web Preview/Open:

Read the rest of this entry »

Appery.io whiteboard was created using Flash. Why did we use Flash and not HTML? Well, today Flash is still the more powerful and flexible solution for this particular job. We knew that today we would have to do a lot more work to create the same functionality in HTML5. But, it’s something we are considering for the future. So, if you try to access Appery.io from iPad, well, you know what’s going to happen (Thanks, Steve). But, not everything is lost! One of the unique and rather powerful features in Appery.io is Web Preview. Web Preview generates standard HTML/JS/CSS and allows you to preview the prototype in any browser, any mobile device and yes, even on iPad and iPhone. This makes it possible to send prototype Web Preview to anyone and ask for their feedback. Isn’t’ this cool? Your boss or customer sitting in a coffee shop, airport, or anywhere else with their laptop, mobile phone or iPad can now review the prototype with just one click! Appery.io Web Preview is interactive, you can click on various controls to open them up such as calendars and navigate between pages.

And one more thing, we are coming with a specialised mobile palette based on jQuery Mobile components. You will soon be able to build prototypes for mobile devices!

1. First, select Web Preview/Share and choose who can view the prototype:
   
2. Then, select Web Preview/Open
   
3. A new page will open (click the link below to see it in action). Go ahead and open this link on Android, iPad or iPhone. Try it!

Layout is crucial in any design. Luckily, Appery.io provides 6 different and customisable layout containers to help you that. All the available layout controls are available via Containers palette:

The first one is Panel:

Panel is more or less a general-purpose container where the layout is set to vertical by default. You can change the layout flow in properties:

Next is Vertical Box in which the layout is set to vertical by default:

Horizontal Box sets layout flow to horizontal:

Flow Box sets layout flow to flow:

Grid Panel divides a panel into equal size squares inside which you can place other controls:

One more is the Tab Panel:

It’s possible to create (and edit) any number of tabs and place any controls inside them:

Enjoy layouts!

Appery.io prototypes are interactive. For example, when you place a tab panel and then view the prototype in a web browser, you can switch between the tabs. We recently made the Appery.io prototypes even more interactive. It’s now possible to navigate between pages (screens). When you use a button, link, or an image you get an option to specify to which page to transition. When running in Web Preview, you will simply navigate to a different page, just like in real application. Well, making it as real as possible is the whole idea behind Appery.io.

Let’s see an example of a multi-screen wizard. First, there are four pages:

This is the first page:

View other pages in prototype in web browser.

If we select the button and look at its properties, we get this:

Once a button is selected, you will see Navigate to option in properties. There it’s possible to select any of the available screens. When viewing the prototype in a web browser, clicking this button will navigate to page 2.

Other controls which support navigation are link and image.

You probably want to see how this works? Just click here to view the prototype in web browser. In addition to links, you can also switch between pages by using the drop down menu at the top of the page.

Our goal is to make the prototype as real as possible.

There are multiple ways to share a Appery.io prototype project. One of the first features in Appery.io was collaboration. During prototype design you can invite anyone to collaborate with you on the prototype in real time. You can invite a colleague working from home or a remote team in another country. There is a even a chat feature. Another way to share is to send a link to the Web Preview of the prototype. This is great if you want to show how the prototype looks in a web browser to a customer. We recently launched another way to share the prototype (the old school way). You can export the entire project into a zipped HTML bundle file and then share the file. Web Preview version (HTML/JS/CSS) will be generated for each screen in prototype and zipped together.

From Projects page, select Options/Export to HTML bundle:

One of the neat features in Appery.io prototypes is dynamic widgets. Let me explain. Let’s say you have a tab panel with three tabs. Different content goes into the three tabs. When you design mockups or wireframes, there is probably no simple way to show what content/widgets go inside the tabs which are now shown. With Appery.io, it’s very simple because the tab widget is dynamic. In other words, you can click on the tab and switch between them. This way you can place different content into the tabs during design as in real application. When you do Web Preview and generate prototpy HTML/JS/CSS, you can switch between the tabs as well.

First tab:

Second tab:

Third tab:

To edit tab label, just double-click on the text. And, to add/remove tabs, click on the tab and invoke the context-menu as shown: