a blog on prototyping by pidoco°

We’ve been hard at work behind the scenes once again to bring you the features you have requested:

Flowchart Elements

Many of our users have asked us whether we can make it easy for them to create flowcharts in the tool. We’ve now added a flowchart section in the stencil palette, so you can map out your processes. Remember, you can change the size of your page in the context menu – so feel free to give yourself lots of space for your flowcharts.

Toggle Stencil

We also have a new stencil for your prototypes. Now you can use the toggle stencil to show and hide elements on your page. In the example below, I created a separate page with a few stencils and set this page as the target of my toggle stencil. Now when I click on the toggle stencil in simulation this drop-down appears. You can also set a target to external websites.

Our new flowchart stencils

Our new Toggle Stencil in action

Teams

You can now create teams in Pidoco. This means that instead of emailing everyone individually to tell them they have access to read or comment on a prototype, you can set up a team and automatically give them these access rights. Here I have selected the marketing team to have access to the prototypes in my folder. Now I need to click “Add to Collaborators”. I can set up new teams by clicking on the button highlighted in red. (Expert Plan)

I can select which team I would like to access my prototype

Project Folders

We realize it can be difficult searching through your prototypes, (especially if you have as many as we do). For this reason we have introduced folders in “My Prototypes” to help you organize your projects better. To do this, simply click “Create Project Folder” and click on the folder icon of your prototype to organize it into a folder. The same principle applies when you organize your pages into folders in the editor. (Expert Plan)

These are my folders – you can create yours by clicking on the blue button.

Once again, we want to thank all of you who have given us feedback on our User Voice Forum, or by email. We really appreciate it and we hope you enjoy these feature updates. Feel free to comment below, or email us with your feedback on these new features. As always, you can find us on Facebook and Twitter. Happy Prototyping!

Have you checked out our new folder system yet? At Pidoco, you can now use folders to organize your pages, stencils and layers. This is a great way to help you keep track of your work, especially if you’re working on a big wireframe project. You can organize your work thematically, or according to the navigation of your site. You can also create subfolders, which is great if you have lots of content in your project. Some people create different pages in Pidoco to show the different states of a wireframe, such as when a popup is used. With Pidoco’s new folder system, you can then group your pages in the same folder or subfolder to help you keep on top of your work. The new breadcrumb navigation system shows you which folder you are currently in just like when you use your computer’s file system. This makes it easy to see exactly where you are in your prototype and move to other folders and pages.

Selecting prototype folder via the new breadcrumb navigation

Using folders with Pidoco is easy. To create a new folder, simply click on the plus sign next to the “Folders” label in the Prototype View. This will take you straight into your new folder. From here you can add new pages, subfolders and other elements. You can name folders and add existing pages to your folder by clicking on the context menu of your page and selecting a folder in the parent folder category. You can select multiple pages by holding the ctrl key and clicking the pages you want to organize in the folders.

In the example below, you can see that I have created a folder called “Home” in my Social Network project. I can now organize my page into the folder “Home” or into one of its subfolders (shown by the ‘/’ symbol).

Organizing pages into folders using the context menu of a page

We hope our new folder system will save you time and make your prototyping even quicker than before by helping you organize your projects. Watch this space for more information about new features. Happy prototyping!

As already mentioned in our previous blog post about the new navigation that we implemented, there were a few new features that had to be finished before we can continue deploying the new version of pidoco. That is also the reason why we weren’t able to deploy this yet, since the features first had to be tested and stabilized to include them into this new preview. Up to now we have finished four out of the five open issues that we mentioned in the other blog post:

Navigation to other pages

We added a little menu to each breadcrumb that opens when you hover over the little grey arrow as shown in the screenshot. It lists all the elements on the same level and you can pick one to switch to that view. We also added a button that opens the desired view in a new browser tab such that you then can easily switch between several views. This way, navigating through your prototype should be as fast as before.

Folders

You can now add folders to your prototype where you can put anything inside. This allows for better organization of all the pages, layers, etc that your prototype contains. In order to move an item to a different folder, use the context menu. A drag and drop moving into a folder has not been implemented yet.

Custom stencils

We already have layers to reuse groups of elements across several pages, but they are always at the same position. From now on you can convert a group of elements into a so called custom stencil that then appears in the palette and can be added anywhere in your prototype. You can add several instances of it to the same page, you can choose different positions, and any change will automatically be applied to all the instances.

New visual design

Since it already took longer to implement things up to now, we skipped this part and will change the design in one of the next versions.

Stability

A whole lot of bugs have been fixed already, but there are still some left to be fixed. As long as we are not satisfied with the quality we won’t deploy the new version. However, it shouldn’t take very long anymore until we reach that point.

Let us know what you think

We would love hearing from you what you think about this new version! If you have any suggestion or feel that there is something important still missing, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.

• Chat with us.
• Feel free to send us a tweet: @pidoco
• We are happy about any email we receive: support@pidoco.com
• You may even give us a call: +49 30 4881 6385

Many thanks for your support!