Michael Matti's dashboard

Peldi - Thanks for adding that tooltip. It's good, but I think it could be even better: right now, it's sort of slimmed down version of the callout control, minus the yellow tinting. That makes it hard to identify as distinctively a tooltip on the page. To make it more tool-tippy, I'd have a clearly defined point at the left end, maybe out and up at a 45-degree angle (aimed northwest, if this were a compass). Sort of like the tips of the comment ballons used on this site. Another approach would be a superimposed mouse pointer arrow, just off to the left, since tooltips come up as a result of mouseover hovers. – Michael Matti, on July 17, 2008 13:24

How about two updates to the UI library: one a new item, and one a tweak to an existing item.

The new thing would be a tooltip widget, sort of like the existing callout disk shape, but this time rectangular and with a point aiming out to the left -- essentially, a hand-drawn version of the default tooltip shape used by Flex. User would double-click to edit the inside text. Found myself needing this just this morning, since prompts/tooltips are part of the spec I'm writing.

Second item is just a tweak to icon-and-text-label. Could we have an option to position the text to the right of the icon? Right now it's hard-wired to below the icon, but I've hit a couple cases where the label needs to be on the right, so had to line up an icon and label to get the effect. Would be cleaner to have the positioning option.

Thanks a bunch. Hope those sound plausible -- and easy to do.

Yup, that nailed it ... second try's the charm. Thanks for pursuing that bug; it was the only thing about Mockups that was making me frown. Come to think of it, let me click this happy face thingy ...

Alas, working with desktop build 1.1.128 today, am still encountering the item-shifting problem. All I have to do is position/size something, switch to a different document using the new bottom row navigator, then switch back. Exporting a PNG also bumps things reliably, too -- anything that causes a screen redraw will trigger the shift.

The real mystery to me why only certain objects exhibit this behavior. If you're having problems reproducing it, let me know and I'll e-mail the XML.

Here's an idea that might be easy to add, and save a lot of time for some users. Much of my design work, sorry to say, involves laying out data input forms. That means text-prompt-and-input-widget, text prompt-and-input-widget, which means insert label, carefully align, insert combobox/textinput/checkbox/whatever, carefully align, rinse, repeat, repeat. It'd be a great if these sorts of input widgets had a "prompt" item in their properties pane that lets you provide the label text, such as "Last name:" and positioned it flush-right just in front of the input widget. Should also have the option of placing it immediately above the item, since some folks prefer that standard.

This would literally cut in half the time I spend assembling form layouts, especially if one of the snap-to alignment points of these widgets was the edge of the widget itself, creating a ragged left edge of prompts and a neatly aligned set of controls.

Does that description make sense?

Another form-centric option, also available from the properties pane, could be a "required" checkbox that inserts an asterisk out to the left of the widget. Right now, that's another manual operation using a label, but would be quicker and easier as a feature of the input item itself.

These are small enhancements compared to some of the other ones listed, but they could save me -- and maybe a bunch of other users -- a lot of time and trouble.

Thanks ...

Thanks for the quick response. I just went back to the Balsamiq site and re-installed from the download link, but it's still sending down version 1.0.18. Tried refreshing my browser, just in case the link in the page was stale, but it's still stuck on 1.0.18. Is it possible the link needs an update? – matti, on July 09, 2008 21:01