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Infragistics, a development tools provider, has released a new version of Indigo Studio, an interaction design tool that incorporates rapid, interactive user interface (UI) wireframing and prototyping with user-centered storyboarding.
The new release, Indigo Studio version 2, has been updated with a host of new features to simplify the process of designing mobile experiences without requiring a single line of code.
This release also makes it easier for users to choose different target devices and test designs for their Web, desktop and mobile UIs. Users now have more flexibility to design for mobile experiences, with a platform selector, new touch gestures, built-in screen-to-screen transitions and the ability to run prototypes on any device that supports HTML5—including iOS, Android and Windows devices.
Additionally, the release features an iOS platform pack, which enables users to accelerate their iOS prototype designs with a variety of easily configurable native controls. Indigo Studio V2 also adds to its design documentation capabilities through its new automated PDF exporting.
“Creating an unforgettable user experience is a reflection of who we are as a company, and with Indigo Studio, we are giving app creators the chance to bring their ideas to life, whether they are seasoned coders and designers, or novice project managers,” said Dean Guida, CEO of Infragistics, in a statement. “Indigo Studio V2 makes the process of creating a UI faster and easier, giving the designer or developer an opportunity to present their concepts for early stakeholder and user-feedback, facilitating a lean UX process and reducing the risk of re-work once the app is in development. No matter what platform they’re creating for, we want our users to have all the tools needed to design rich and interactive UIs they know will work and, in turn, deliver exceptional user experiences.”
In addition to the new features, Indigo Studio allows users to design storyboards with real-world usage context, integrate their prototypes within their storyboards, and annotate, share and document their designs.
Indigo Studio is available for an annual subscription of $495 or $249 for renewals rate, and will also be included as part of the NetAdvantage Ultimate and NetAdvantage for .NET bundles. For a limited time, customers using Indigo Studio V1 will be entitled to upgrade to Indigo Studio V2 for just $99. A free, supported 30-day trial of Indigo Studio V2.0 is available for download at http://www.infragistics.com/products/indigo-studio.
In July, Telerik, an application development tools maker that offers products that compete with Infragistics’, updated its Kendo UI solution. Known as the Q2 2013 release of Kendo UI, the company’s latest HTML5 and JavaScript platform included low-level performance optimizations across Web, data visualization and mobile fronts.
New features in the Kendo UI Q2 2013 release include the introduction of a “Flat UI” theme for Kendo UI Web and a “Flat UI” universal theme for Kendo UI Mobile, which improves app performance by 30 percent; support for tables in Kendo UI Editor, along with a new responsive rendering that adapts across desktop and mobile browsers; and a new Scheduler widget for Kendo UI Web, the most requested widget of 2013, the company said.
“Developers working with HTML5 and JavaScript today are often concerned with performance, both on the Web and mobile,” said Todd Anglin, executive vice president of cross-platform tools and services at Telerik. “Rather than build custom demos to showcase the power of the Web platform, we invested in framework engineering that delivers maximum performance out-of-the-box. Developers using Kendo UI to build modern Web or mobile apps simply have better performing solutions compared to using other frameworks. We’re doing the hard, low-level optimizations so our customers can stay focused on building amazing experiences for their customers.”
Other new features in the latest release of Kendo UI include ASP.NET MVC server wrappers for Kendo UI Mobile and a Facebook-style “Drawer menu” widget. Meanwhile, Telerik made moves to improve the performance of the tool, including claiming 200 percent performance gains on all out-of-the-box mobile app transitions. Also new are faster view transitions and kinetic scrolling for large and virtualized lists, scrolling performance improvements for all DataViz charts, and HTML5 Canvas rendering support for all DataViz charts and graphs.
“The simplicity of Kendo UI allows our development team to progress much more rapidly from design to delivery,” said Telmo Silva, managing director at ClicData, a maker of data management and visualization tools that uses Kendo UI. “On the mobile front, we are able to go directly to tablet and mobile without touching the back-end services, and with little impact on the learning curve of the development team. At the same time, the Kendo UI themes provide an exciting interface for users, and the Kendo UI Data Viz components—especially the animated chart and gauge controls—are powerful additions to what would otherwise be typically number-heavy and table-heavy static user experiences.”