After our release back in August where we improved the usability of our layer system, it’s time for another major feature on our road to redesign pidoco: groups. With the current release you can group several elements together such that they behave as one single element. You can move them, clone them, copy them to a different page, do whatever you like, without the need to first select all single items. It is also possible to add groups to another group.
Why is this a major feature? Because groups will become custom stencils in the future. To be more precise: you will be able to convert a group into a custom stencil that is available in your palette. This way, you will be able to change several occurrences of such a stencil at once by modifying the custom stencil. But this is future talk, for now there are just simple groups.
This not being enough, we also added two new stencils: unordered and ordered lists. They can be edited similar to the way you define the hierarchy of a menu but are converted to the HTML ul and ol elements. All entries that begin with stars (*) are unordered items and all entries with the hash (#) are ordered items. This way, you can also mix both types in one list.
Do you have ideas for further stencils? Are you missing a feature very bad? Have a look at our feedback forum and add your thoughts or vote for existing suggestions.
It would be cool to see the exported version of the Pidoco prototype for Pidoco. You might not want to publish your current thinking, but perhaps you could show the prototype for a published revision.
I quite like Pidoco so far. I’d like a little more clarity on how “real-time” it is — a colleague and I both looked at and modified models at the same time, and the “rules” for pushing changes weren’t quite clear to me.
When a tool’s real-time collaboration becomes very responsive and you can see the changes someone else is making, within seconds, it becomes an accelerator. It’s exciting to see fast change in a complex information space.
We’re still in our evaluation, but expect to be subscribing shortly.