Briefs 1.1
Device: Mac OS
Category: Developer Tools
Price: $199.99, Version: 1.0.5 -> 1.1 (iTunes)
Description:Briefs is the essential app design tool built for a professional design workflow. Lifeless mockups don’t tell the entire story, but you don’t have time to build a prototype. We’ve been there, too. Your clients needed a clearer picture, so give them something to touch. With Briefs, you can deliver iterations of your design that people can play with on their phone and start giving you feedback. Before you know it, you’ve cut months of back and forth from your schedule without a dime of development. Powerful enough for you? What is a brief? ∙ Describes a mobile app to others. ∙ Combines images, and interaction to articulate the essential function of an app ∙ A brief contains a timeline, with multiple scenes. ∙ A scene is a full-screen image that represents a visual state within the app ∙ Each scene contains one or many actors that control interaction ∙ Actors are images that can have defined actions. Using scenes, actors, and actions as building blocks, you can quickly add a rich description to a series of images. Its more descriptive than a mockup, but less complicated than a prototype. Briefs is the perfect format to communicate a your intention to clients, developers and testers. Works like you do. ∙ Work with your existing app mockups ∙ Breathe interaction into your lifeless buttons, navigation bars and menus ∙ Make adjustments and tweaks based on what you feel. Realtime interaction with Briefscase. ∙ Briefscase is a companion app for iOS ∙ Communicate every update in realtime straight to the device using BriefsLive ∙ Use it to get immediate feedback on your design Blueprints for the 21st Century. ∙ Clearly and unambiguously communicate the design of your apps to clients, developers, or anyone else. ∙ Don't worry about assets getting sliced properly ∙ No longer fret over precise positioning ∙ Ambiguity is obliterated ∙ Assets are automatically exported ∙ Track the last version delivered to a developer ∙ Quickly identify changes and where updates are needed BriefsLive requires an iOS device running iOS 6.0 or better, a shared network connection between the computer and the iOS device and Briefscase running. Briefscase is available for free on the App store. Note: Briefs is a design tool and not an app development environment. Briefs created using it cannot be submitted to the iOS App store. We recommend Xcode and a knowledgeable developer for that.
What's New
Back at the ship, we're always hard at work building new features. We're proud to bring you latest release stuffed with great new features and serious performance enhancements.New Features------------iCloud - We've enabled iCloud syncing. By saving a brief to iCloud, it becomes available to your iOS devices and Macs connected to iCloud. And if your brief is on iCloud, you can now share a link with others through the sharing menu. Dropbox - We've also added support for storing briefs inside of your Dropbox folder. All briefs saved in a specific location (~/Dropbox/Apps/Briefs) in your Dropbox Folder will get synced between Macs and devices. You must enable Dropbox syncing on your device to automatically sync briefs on the go.Scrollable Actors - Our most requested feature was support for scrolling. You can now make any selected actor scrollable. Select an actor and choose "Define Scrollable Region..." from the Actor menu to bring up the interface. Note: Hot Spot actors are not supported for scrolling because that wouldn't make any sense.Scene Gestures - Our second most requested feature was support for gestures. You can now assign assign actions for gestures performed on a scene. We support swipe, and pinch gestures. These actions can target other actors, like actor actions or scenes, so you can goto another scene. Additionally, you can add an action whenever a scene is launched. This is particularly powerful when combined with action delays to simulate network loads or large database operations.Asset Browser - Finally, we've made it a lot easier to manage your art inside and outside of Briefs. To get started, you can associate a folder of assets with a brief by opening the library (now the Asset Browser), switching the managed first tab (the folder icon) and selecting a folder containing the artwork for the brief. Now you can drag and drop your assets directly to the canvas to create actors. You can also create scenes (with the asset set to the scene background) by holding option while dragging to the canvas. As a bonus, when you update the asset outside of briefs in your favorite image editor, well automatically update that asset inside of Briefs when you return.Additionally we've made substantial visual improvements to the layout of the library items to make it easier to scan and choose the correct item.Bug Fixes---------Fixed a crash that could occur when Briefs was generating scene thumbnails in the background.Fixed a crash that could occur if the current brief was published to a device running an active BriefsLive session.Fixed an issue where undo could cause unwanted font, color and text changes.Fixed an issue that would mangle the Z-order of elements when pasting a group.Fixed an issue where closing a brief could take a very long time.Fixed an issue that wouldn't prompt you for a file name, if the brief had already been autosaved.Fixed an issue that would randomly delete scenes when reordering scenes in the source list.Fixed an issue where guidelines could become inverted after zooming the canvas.Fixed an issue that would cause inflated brief file sizes, even after deleting items to shrink the brief. Saving the affected brief with this version will compact the brief automatically.Improved performance of loading and saving briefsImproved performance of selecting a lot of actors with goto actionsThe simulator window now floats above all windows.
Briefs