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The main difference is the ribbon menu. I am not
a fan of ribbon menus, but I am learning to like them a bit.
The idea that everything is visible is nice, and the icons
are useful. The fact that they cannot be customised is
a pain in my view. I would like to be able to add my own
ribbon pane, at the very least, for my own frequent
command. The toolbar is too small and far away to be too
useful. This is not aimed at the Metastorm BPM Designer
per se, but at the format in general. My greatest
difficulty is learning where everything is all over
again. Since so much has changed, that is not an
overriding factor in this case.
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| The Home menu shows firstly
all the components you can add to a Project. It does not show
Project or Libraries, these are added from the main
menu.
The tooltip provides
more information, as with all the menu items:
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This list can be expanded like so to provide a
more detailed description:
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There is also a
context menu on the Solution Explorer,
although we did notice that it does not
change depending on what is selected. This can cause
confusion as the inserted component may not end
up where you expect if you have not
selected a suitable container.
Both this and the above menu also regard
the component open in the main window as
the selected component, not what is selected in
the Solution Explorer. This can cause
confusion too if you have the default of
double-clicking to select the component
set.
The remaining menu items are fairly
standard toggle buttons and a few dropdowns. We
shall discuss each as we use the related
components.
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The Design menu has items for setting fonts and
colours, as well as the styles in the Process Map. It also
has the Tab Order toggle for Forms.
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The Layout menu is the richest, and probably the
most time- saving feature. You can see all the various
option, all clearly laid out in our opinion. Never again will
I get all my stages and Action clumped together because
I can never tell the difference between vertical and
horizontal alignment!
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The View menu mainly toggles the various panes,
and it also opens the few remaining dialogs such as
translations.
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When you get to various places in the Solution
you will edit items in a Grid. When this happens you get a
Grid Tools menu. We have noticed this is not always selected
automatically, however.
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Likewise, when you select a Report, there is a
Reporting Tools menu.
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The Scripting Editor has a very interesting
toolbar. This promises to be very useful. More about that
when we look at Scripting.
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From the Main menu you can open the most
recent files.
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You can ‘pin’ any of these
to the list to create a favourites list, as
well.
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The ‘New’ menu offers a
new Project or Library. These are added to the current
Solution. The only way to create a new
Solution is to close you file and add a Project
or Solution.
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The only other submenu
is ‘Export’. This allows you to
export components as components, images or even
as Templates (for Forms).
The Import allows you to import Packages, but we
are not sure what they are or how they are
created as yet. We assume they will be
implemented in the full release.
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There is also a
single toolbar,
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With the standard single option
to display it below the
ribbon.
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In the Options you
can customise this toolbar by adding all
your frequently used commands.
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As I usually find, I would like to be able
to choose large icons, but this is not
possible.
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As is also standard, pressing Alt or F10
will show the shortcut keys from there to
access each item. This is a nice feature,
especially on a laptop with no mouse, I
find.
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1. Designer User Interface
