Remaining faithful to our agile development process, we frequently release new features and functionality to enhance Proto.io (see changelog). Some of these releases include bug fixes, tweaks, minor features and new functionality. Others include major features and changes we believe are worth announcing. This is one of those times! Our latest release v.3.2 includes new features that expand the reach of Proto.io, increase usability and offer better and faster mobile prototyping.
Windows 8 (metro) device library
Following popular demand we are excited to announce our latest device library, Windows 8 (metro). The Windows 8 library includes over 30 new UI components, Windows 8 color collections, SVG icons support and more.
Windows 8 may still be far behind competitive iOS and Android platforms, but we believe that the Windows 8 library is essential for every prototyping tool. Windows 8 UI can be found on the new window-based mobile devices as well as the Windows 8 operating system and XBOX devices. Click to see a Windows 8 fully interactive mobile prototype demo demonstrating the UI components of the new Window 8 device library.
SVG images and huge SVG icon library
SVG images are great when it comes to prototyping. Being vector graphics, they can scale without any loss of quality or image distortions. The new Proto.io Asset Manager not only allows the traditional upload and use of any image or digital asset, but it is also enriched with a large SVG icons gallery comprising of more than two thousand useful SVG icons. The SVG icon library is also available as a component library for easy drag-n-drop on the canvas. What we are really proud of is that we have developed a sophisticated mechanism that allows designers to apply any color to the SVG icons found in the library – no more using icons that don’t match your design’s color palette!
New super-fast saving
Saving was an issue for Proto.io especially when it came to large projects. The old Proto.io save function would upload the entire project file to the server thus making saving project-size dependent. The new saving method introduced in v.3.2 does not upload the whole project to the server, but instead sends only the altered screens, templates or containers to the server, significantly reducing the upload file size. This results to up to a 20x faster saving speeds!
Project file backups are still kept with each save to allow rollback to any previous saved version of the project.
Smart guides snap
In our effort to improve usability we introduce smart guides snap. Smart guides can be turned on and off. When smart guides are enabled, smart guides appear on the canvas as you drag or resize a UI element, allowing you to position your element on the same x or y coordinates with nearby components which makes horizontal and vertical aligning much easier.
We are committed to enhancing Proto.io with new features and functionality. Several of the changes implemented to the tool come from your suggestions. We thank you for your valuable feedback, feature requests, suggestions and inspiring ideas!
