Storyboard Designer

The main focus in this release of Storyboard Designer was to enable collaboration across the entire product development team including embedded engineers, UI designers, graphic artists, Project and Product Managers. Storyboard Designer now enables all users to effectively work on a single project in a collaborative manner in an environment that is comfortable and familiar to them.

Major Changes

Mac OS X Support

Support for Storyboard development under Mac OS X is now available including a complete simulator (via SDL) to verify and test your application. All features included in the existing Windows and Linux Storyboard Designer will be supported with the new Mac OS X version.

Support is for Mac OS X 10.6.0 or greater (X86 only)

Collaboration Support with graphical model compare

In this release we have added support for collaboration which enables a Storyboard project to be effectively managed in a code repository. Storyboard Designer will provide multiple customized views for a user to evaluate changes between project versions. The different views include source, properties and graphical which will enable anyone from an embedded engineer to the UI design or Project manager to effectively track UI changes throughout the project lifecycle.

UI Design Report

Users of Storyboard Designer are now able to generate a complete UI Design Report showing images of all the project's Screens and Layers along with details on all the variables and actions that are associated with them. The UI Design Report is able to be exported as HTML or Adobe PDF.

Minor Changes

Notes section now available for all model elements

In the properties view for all model elements (application, screen, layers, and controls) you can now include notes to better explain the purpose and functionality of each element. All notes are included in the UI Design Report as well.

More flexibility with variable selection

When selecting variables for use as properties or animations you can create custom selections and access variables that are out of context.

Support for offscreen controls

You can now set all properties for a control to be negative values.

Win32 runtime is now located with all other runtimes

The Win32 Storyboard Engine is now available in the standard location with the rest of the runtimes [install dir]/storyboard engine/ .

PSD import improvements

Improvements to the PSD import fix a short coming of the previous release where certain layer and group names would cause PSD layers not to be imported. A fix was added that addresses an issue with duplicate names in the PSD file overriding images in the filesystem.

New control alignment options

New alignment buttons have been added to the tool bar to provide additional layout options:

  • stack vertically

  • stack horizontally

  • distribute equally vertically

  • distribute equally horizontally

Added recently used sort policy and readable names to action wizard

The list in the events and action dialogs are now sorted via a frequently used policy making it quicker to find high usage list items. The naming of many actions and events has been updated to provide more familiar naming.

Strings with comma's or equal signs no longer need to be in a variable

The caveat of only being able to use strings with commas or equal signs, from within a variable, is no longer a requirement. All characters can now be used from within a static text string.

Known Issues

  • When using Storyboard Designer on Mac OS X there have been on rare occasions that a font can get corrupted and is substituted with a square containing random symbols. Restarting Storyboard Designer appears to workaround this issue. The simulator isn't affected by this issue.

  • Focus of drop down lists requires the user to hit return to commit the selection to the drop down.