Indigo Studio Update Simplifies Mobile App Development

Infragistics, a development tools provider, has released a new version of Indigo Studio, an interaction design tool that incorporates rapid, interactive user interface (UI) wireframing and prototyping with user-centred storyboarding.

The new release, Indigo Studio version 2, has been updated with a host of new features to simplify the process of designing mobile experiences without requiring a single line of code.

Target device testing

This release also makes it easier for users to choose different target devices and test designs for their web, desktop and mobile UIs. Users now have more flexibility to design for mobile experiences, with a platform selector, new touch gestures, built-in screen-to-screen transitions and the ability to run prototypes on any device that supports HTML5 – including iOS, Android and Windows devices.

Additionally, the release features an iOS platform pack, which enables users to accelerate their iOS prototype designs with a variety of easily configurable native controls. Indigo Studio V2 also adds to its design documentation capabilities through its new automated PDF exporting.

“Indigo Studio V2 makes the process of creating a UI faster and easier, giving the designer or developer an opportunity to present their concepts for early stakeholder and user-feedback, facilitating a lean UX process and reducing the risk of re-work once the app is in development,” said Dean Guida, chief executive of Infragistics, in a statement.

In addition to the new features, Indigo Studio allows users to design storyboards with real-world usage context, integrate their prototypes within their storyboards, and annotate, share and document their designs.

Indigo Studio is available for an annual subscription of $495 (£310) or $249 for renewals rate, and will also be included as part of the NetAdvantage Ultimate and NetAdvantage for .NET bundles. For a limited time, customers using Indigo Studio V1 will be entitled to upgrade to Indigo Studio V2 for $99. A free, supported 30-day trial of Indigo Studio V2.0 is available for download here.

Kendo UI update

In July, Telerik, an application development tools maker that offers products that compete with Infragistics’, updated its Kendo UI solution. Known as the Q2 2013 release of Kendo UI, the company’s latest HTML5 and JavaScript platform included low-level performance optimisations across web, data visualisation and mobile fronts.

New features in the Kendo UI Q2 2013 release include the introduction of a “Flat UI” theme for Kendo UI web and a “Flat UI” universal theme for Kendo UI Mobile, which improves app performance by 30 percent; support for tables in Kendo UI Editor, along with a new responsive rendering that adapts across desktop and mobile browsers; and a new Scheduler widget for Kendo UI web, the most requested widget of 2013, the company said.

Other new features in the latest release of Kendo UI include ASP.NET MVC server wrappers for Kendo UI Mobile and a Facebook-style “Drawer menu” widget. Meanwhile, Telerik made moves to improve the performance of the tool, including claiming 200 percent performance gains on all out-of-the-box mobile app transitions. Also new are faster view transitions and kinetic scrolling for large and virtualised lists, scrolling performance improvements for all DataViz charts, and HTML5 Canvas rendering support for all DataViz charts and graphs.

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Originally published on eWeek.