Maqetta Announces Release 7 Sep 6

The Maqetta team is pleased to announce the Release 7 of the Maqetta visual authoring tool Maqetta.org.

Here is a summary of new features:

User interface makeover:

• New visual styling for nearly all of the most common user interface components
• Redesigned, collapsable palettes on left and right side of user interface
• Streamlined user interface for creating HTML files
• Redesigned and streamlined toolbar
• New welcome page
• New login and registration screens

Performance improvements:

• Page editor speedups - Release 7 includes several performance improvements, particularly around opening up new HTML files and increased snappiness when users add new widgets to the page.
• Release 7 integrates ZAZL open source technology into Maqetta’s preview-in-browser feature. When turned on (in the Preferences dialog on the Settings menu at the top-right of the top toolbar), whenever a user clicks on the preview-in-browser button, Maqetta will run ZAZL on the server to optimize (build and minify) the user’s HTML page to minimize network requests and download sizes when viewing that page directly in the web browser, typically speeding up first-time previews considerably.

Eclipse Orion integration

• Release 7 adds a new command to the Open menu, “Open Orion Navigator”, which opens a new browser window that launches the Eclipse Orion cloud-based source development tools, where you can perform source editing in the cloud on the various files within your Maqetta workspace. Release 7 replaces most of the old logic for user management and workspace management with Orion code that provided similar services.

HTML table enhancements:

• Table dialog at table creation time (and subsequent editing) - With Release 7, when a user adds an HTML table to the page, he is presented with a dialog that allows the user to chooose number of rows, number of columns, border thickness, ‘border-collapse’, ‘table-layout’ and whether first row should be a header row
• Column width control on the canvas

Tree widget enhancements:

• User can specify custom icons on individual tree nodes. For container tree nodes, users can specify both a closed and open icon.
• User can specify what actions to take on each tree node for click, double-click, open and close.
• Ability to reorder tree nodes via simple drag/drop.

Save As Widget : This command will create a re-usable widget out of the currently selected widget, and add a new widget into a “User Widgets” section of the widgets palette..

Keyboard shortcuts for common operations - Release 7 supports various common keyboard shortcuts in the visual editor, including shortcuts for cut, copy, paste, undo, redo and save.

Many bug fixes

Migration of User Workspaces - if you run on Maqetta.org, your projects should be migrated automatically. See release notes for details.