GUI Design Studio version 3.5 is now available for immediate download. This is a maintenance release with some fixes and changes based on customer requests. It’s a free upgrade for all registered users.

For customers using any prior version of GUI Design Studio, simply install the new version and your existing licenses will continue to work.

Tree Icons
Until now, Tree elements have come with just a couple of basic sets of icons and the only way to change individual item icons was to place other icons on top.

That worked well until scrolling and item expansion/contraction functionality was added in version 3.3. After that, you needed to jump through a few hoops with components to get custom tree icons working properly.

Well, we’ve finally given Tree items their own icon property so you can now select them directly and everything works as it should. For convenience, the icon selector also keeps a record of the 10 most recent icons for fast, one-click selection.

Other Changes

• Slider elements now have a “Reverse Range” option that makes them slide from right to left instead of left to right (for Horizontal Sliders). This will become more important in version 4.0 when it’s released. Vertical Sliders now default to upwards unless reversed and this may have a minor impact on some existing designs.
• Based on customer requests, the context menu on the Project panel file tree has been expanded and re-arranged to make it even more useful.
• When you connect screens in GUI Design Studio, you’re really building a true application prototype. We want to emphasize this more so, as a rather subtle but pervasive change, all references to “Simulation” are being phased out and replaced with references to “Prototypes”. This will be most apparent with the disappearance of the “Simulator” menu which has been renamed to “Run”.
• We realized that a few of the newer keyboard shortcuts were conflicting with the main menu so we’ve changed them as follows:
  • Go to connection source: Alt+R -> Ctrl+R
  • Go to connection target: Alt+T -> Ctrl+T
  • Swap selected elements: Alt+S -> Ctrl+W

Bug Fixes

• The Notes panel now behaves correctly when the Design/Activity Bar is floating rather than docked to the side of the main window. Now you can make full use of the design screen by placing the panels out of the way on a second monitor. Thanks to all those that reported this bug.
• Redundant checking of the SVN repository has been removed to improve performance in certain circumstances when using team collaboration features.
• Changes to project and folder links are now saved correctly. In V3.4 this became intermittent depending on whether other changes were triggering the project save or not.
• Property editor buttons have been made taller, where necessary, to ensure that shortcut key indicators (underlines) are visible on all supported platforms.

Download and Upgrade
Download GUI Design Studio version 3.5 now and install it over your existing version. If you have purchased a license, your existing key will continue to work.

Version 3.5 is fully compatible with projects and files created in earlier versions but certain features, such as Tree item icons, will not be recognized by earlier versions of the software so be careful if sharing projects with others.