Rulers & Guides to Design Your Prototype Screens

George Abraham / Friday, October 3, 2014

We are pretty busy working on the next major version of Indigo Studio, but that does not mean that we don’t release our regular update :).

Update 4 includes:

Creating and Editing Visual Guides using Rulers

Indigo Studio already had snapping guides and equal spacing hints ever since we shipped v1. For most design activities, that’s usually enough. We are enhancing this capability by adding the ability to create and edit permanent visual guides.

To add a guide, click on the add new guide invite (+) shown when you hover in the ruler area. You can either add guides visually by dragging and positioning them on the canvas, or click on the selected guide adorner to key in a precise value. You can delete guides by selecting and hitting the delete key or right click on the guide to see guide-related options. To hide all guides, use the CMD/CTRL + L shortcut or via the canvas properties.

Creating and Editing Guides

Rulers for the Canvas

Nothing much to say about this feature other than rulers and guides go hand in hand. And can be hidden using the same short cut for hiding guides (i.e., cmd/ctrl + L) or via canvas properties.

Disable Common Input UI elements

When prototyping, you may have the need to make certain UI elements appear disabled, for example, text fields and buttons. When you disable something, you will see a dotted selection adorner to identify the UI elements as disabled. Since Indigo Studio is all about interactive prototyping, disabling will also prevent any interaction from being triggered in the running prototype. It has no effect during design time.

Disabled Elements

More Icons

We are working out ways for you to include your own icons. In the mean time we have added a few more from FontAwesome.

Did you know Indigo Studio already ships with 350+ vector icons? Throw in the ability to resize them freely and adjust color/transparency, and the combinations are numerous. There are a lot of icon packs that do some bogus calculations to inflate the number of unique icons.

icons

The truth is that one can never have enough icons :). We can offer a million, and still be less useful to you because you were looking for that specific icon. We understand this need. Nothing would please us more than to offer more icons, and even better, let you include your own. You can still drag and drop external icons as a PNG to use in your design.

Keep an eye out for icons related announcements in future updates. Hope that does not prevent you for prototyping!

How to get this update?

Here's how you can update the version of Indigo Studio installed on your machine:

  • If you have the option to automatically check for updates on startup checked, you should see a dialog box pop up when you launch Indigo. Simply click update, and Indigo Studio will do the rest. This is the easier approach.
  • If for some reason you chose not to automatically check for updates, go to MENU > HELP & ABOUT and use the "CHECK FOR UPDATES" option.

Checking for Updates

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