Monday 18 March 2013

User Suggestions and Our Thoughts

Thank you for all the suggestions.  Here are some of the short lists we are exploring and hopefully complete.  Please continue providing us with any further feedbacks.

Printing and Higher Quality Scaling

    PDF export and page size restriction.  We’ll include some boundary indicators to let user draw within a letter or legal size.  We are still learning about the graphic engine to improve the text quality when scaling down.  The current standard library doesn’t have advance filtering options so we may have to rewrite some of the graphic engine to achieve this.

More Customizable Connectors
  1. Connector coloring – we’ll apply the same coloring gesture to connector.  Also, drawing a new connector will take the recent connector color instead of the default.
  2. Connector endpoint shapes – Potentially include crow foot
  3. Movable Connector endpoint – Have multiple and adjustable connector endpoints
  4. Connector joints – We’ll look to extend the connector joints

Advance Text Editor

We are exploring ways to make text editor easier and quicker based on the shape or type of diagram 

Example:

    When adding label to a connector, user doesn’t have to use text markup.  There will be three input forms for start point, center point, and end point.
    When labeling a box in class diagram – We’ll add advance text markup for name, attributes, and functions.    Alternatively, user can switch from the raw editor to class editor where we’ll provide three input forms instead of the markup.
  •  .class.
  • .attr.
  • .func.

Custom Library

    We do have a lot of requests for custom image library.  Currently, we prefer to put as many standard images to our existing library.  Please send us some of your images that you would like to include as part of the current library. 
     As for custom library, we are still planning on it.  The problem isn’t really about the coding but is more about supporting many devices and optimizing memory usage.  We are currently supporting all devices from Android 2.2+.  The dilemma is whether we want to drop the older model phones.  With older phones having significant less memory, therefore it has higher change of crashing.    

Some additional suggestions that we are still thinking about and will update later
  • Layering and grouping
  • Free hand draw
  • Supporting free lines, curves, etc …
  • Linking, tagging, and network storage/repository
  • More language inputs
  • Integration with other editors

Wednesday 6 March 2013

For Crackberry Users!


Update 6 - Mar 12:
We still haven't get any approval from Blackberry for our new release 1.0.7.  This version also opened to BB10 users.

Update 5 - Mar 06:

We got a BB 10 Dev Alpha phone today thank to a great person from BlackBerry.  We hope to release it for BB10 users in our upcoming version 1.0.6.

Update 4:

Trying to convert the app for Z10 but there is a bug in a Simulator so we have to wait still we get access to physical device.

Update 3:

We are getting some good discussions with people from Crackberry forum.  Please feels free to join us there as well.

Update2:

We got an approval from Blackberry!  Much faster than what we expected :)

Update:

We have submitted version 1.0.2 to BB World for Playbook.

Since we are supporting Android 2.2+, we decided to port our current app to Blackberry Playbook and possibly BB10.  The conversion is going well so far and here is a screenshot of the test result.  We’ll update this post when we publish it on the Blackberry World.