Storyboard Designer

In the release of Storyboard Designer 1.3 there was a focus on bug fixes, stability, accelerated performance, improved collaboration, and a number of tweaks and enhancements to the development environment that will make the creation of rich embedded UI's that much easier.

Major Changes

Properties View

Another change we have made is to the properties view. Is has been changed to a vertical layout to be docked on the left or right of the environment. This opens up the main editor area providing more room for manipulating your application's screen and layer assets.

Drag and Drop in the Application View

The application view now supports drag and drop within its tree structure. This feature allows you to move layers, controls, etc. around by simply clicking and dragging to where you want them to be.

Pop-up Preview

Holding down Ctrl and hovering the cursor over a screen, layer or control, in the Application Model view, presents that asset in a pop-up preview window.

Audio

Now supporting Linux and Windows.

Templates

One thing our customers will probably appreciate is the ability to create templates. If you see yourself going through the repetitive motions of creating a button with some sort of action associated with it; you can now create a template of that button. This enables you to save that control with actions for reuse later in your project.

Resource Clean up

For resource constrained devices you only want the assets absolutely needed in your application. Using the new resource cleanup functionality enables you to analyse your application and delete any images or fonts not associated with the final release. This cuts down on not needed images taking up valuable space but also makes sure you are not including unlicensed fonts with your application.

Goto

Use the keyboard combination Ctrl-1 to be presented with the new GoTo functionality. Type in a layer, control, function etc. name to get a list of where that name is referenced in your entire application. Very useful for finding resources or assets quickly in a large application.

Minor Changes

Collaboration

For the most part collaboration is currently usually done with comparing local files or using SVN. Some customers have asked for changes to collaboration to fit into their existing environment. We have listened and added further enhancements to better facilitate Git workflows.

PSD Import

A large number of our customers use Photoshop as their main environment for creating UI content. We are constantly working on improvements to make it easy as possible to work with PSD files within Storyboard Designer. One new feature that should make life easier is the ability to import multiple PSD files to a single GDE file.

Layer Asset Manager

We have made some presentation changes within Storyboard Designer to make better overall use of space in the tool. Now in the Layer view you will be able to hover over an asset to get a pop up that gives a live representation of the Layer.