AxShare Interactive Redline Plugin

#63

So I’m not sure how other companies use this functionality but I can shed some light on our company.

We are moving to a single deliverable via axure that our on/off shore developers can work from. So for us, our developers would use the “redline” version while business would use the “business” version.

The “business” version would also be used to do things such as usability testing with our users which is why we don’t need to show redlines, annotations, etc within the business link.

However for the redline version, it would be helpful to keep all of the information for an element/object within the black panel of the redline tool. This would help support our offshore developers who work odd hours by providing all the information that they need about an object/element in one place and within context of the other available information.

I could see how the information within the black panel would start to get very long- perhaps adding an expand/collapse within the black panel for the notes would be a good way to approach it.

Please see below:

redlinetoolexample.png608×1300 39.9 KB

#64

Hi, @srm985.

I just want to thank you for sharing such a great tool with us. It is really useful.

:clap::clap::clap:

#65

Agreed, this is a great tool and very helpful. :slight_smile:

#66

I certainly appreciate all of the praise! I’m very open to feedback and improvement opportunities as well. I’d really like to make your lives as easy as possible.

#67

Hi @srm985, any ideas on the notes? Have you thought about a tabbed structure where you separate out “styling”, “content”, and “functionality”… Perhaps, having two different versions available for users. Thanks!

#68

Pardon the slow reply. No, I have not yet progressed on this request. One aspect I’m struggling decide about is how to handle capturing of the notes. For example, let’s say that a parent element has a not placed on it. However, the parent element also has a child and grandchild. The child also has a note on it. Now, if I click on the grandchild, what is the expected behavior? My intuition says to only display any notes on the direct element clicked, and on the highest parent of the element. How does that sound? And what about the grandchild? What if it has children who also have notes? Should we display those?

Pertaining to the tabbed structure - I am hesitant to implement this as there is already a tabbed structure used to display styling for various states of the element. Perhaps I need to take over the left side of AxShare as well and display notes there? I’m not sure yet.

#69

For those of you using RP9, the tool should now be supporting the new product. If you find any issues, please let me know!

#70

Thank you for the information

#71

We’ve just started using the redline plugin and we are very impressed! Coming to the Axure 9 beta from Sketch and InVision, this is exactly what we were looking for. Thank you so much for sharing this.

Is there an option to completely hide your plugin’s UI when a page is first loaded? One of the main use cases behind this request is for running usability tests. While our front-end developers absolutely love the utility of an interactive redline inspector, end users participating in a usability test will find the controls distracting and confusing. If there could be an option to toggle your tool by adding a variable to the page’s URL, that would be great. I’m imaging something similar to how Axure allows you to show or hide their AxShare UI by appending “&c=1” to the end of the URL.

Would this be a possibility? Or, are there are any other workarounds available to toggle whether the redline tool is visible or not on a given page? Thank you!

#72

@iguy thanks for all the kind words! In the plugin header there are two links - developer and business. Simply share the business link. With the business link the tool is completely disabled. If you have any feedback on how to make those links more intuitive, I’d love to hear any improvement opportunities.

#73

Thank you so much, srm985! This precisely addresses the challenge I was experiencing. To improve the discoverability of this feature, perhaps the tool could display informational tooltips about the business and dev links on mouse over. The image below illustrates how this idea might look.

image.png1680×164 36.8 KB

#74

This is AWESOME!
Thank you for putting in the time and effort to create such a useful extension to the power of Axure AND for sharing it with the rest of us!
:clap:

#75

Thanks for all the support! I’m currently working on V3 which won’t initially have a lot of new features, but it will make coding much easier so that I can expand the tool further to offer additional features. In the interim, I’m always happy to review any feature requests.

#76

Great tool! My dev team is making good use of it.

An issue that has recently come about is that when viewing a long scrolling design spec the browser opens the page in the middle of the screen as opposed to the top. Also intermittently, the design will be far off to the right and down out of sight and the devs have to do quite a bit of scrolling to see the design.

Have you or anyone else experienced this behavior? It only seems to happen to pages that use the redline plugin.

Thanks!

#77

@mojorisen there was a bug raised about this a while ago related to dropdown components and components which had nested scrolling. This was resolved, but I suspect this is a similar scenario. Can you either share the page in question, create a simplified page which still reproduces this issue, or share the Axure file? I know this is sometimes tricky when proprietary content is involved, so I’m happy to work with you to come up with some way for me to reproduce this bug on my end.

#78

Greetings all! Just release V3 of the tool! For those of you subscribed to the latest version, you should be migrated over seamlessly. You’ll know you’re on V3 when you see a modal welcoming you to the version. This is a complete rewrite of the application, with the intention of making development iterations faster. I’ve added a few features and modified a few things, but it will probably look somewhat similar.
This is a completely new version and I hope I have not introduced any bugs, but if you do run across any, please let me know and I’ll resolve them quickly! Thanks everyone for the continued use of the tool.

Latest Demo

#79

srm,
Here is a link that illustrates the issue of the spec/page not positioning itself by default to be top left as it does without the plugin installed on the page. The page opens up in the middle and not really sure why this is happening.

https://mpq0dr.axshare.com/#id=cu1uak&p=positioning_test&g=1
pass: position2019

#80

@mojorisen thanks for providing me with the sample! That makes life very easy. So there are a couple of things that look to be happening here.

The first thing you mention is that it’s opening in the middle of the page. That is desired behavior if I understand your comment correctly. The idea is to render your page as an artboard. what you should be seeing is your work surrounded by a large gray, textured padding. The reason you are seeing that white space on the left side of the placeholders you created is because they are shifted over x number of pixels from the left side of the page. the way the tool works to generate the artboard is it looks at the top left corner of the Axure file, then it iterates through all of the components to find the component furthest left and furthest down. This intersection becomes the bottom right corner of the artboard.

Now, I did notice one odd behavior though - it looks like you’re using the RP9 interface and there seems to be a bug when the AxShare left side panel and Axshare header are open. It pushes my application down and to the right which hides the artboard scrollbars you’d normally be seeing. Take a look at your artboard with the panels collapsed:
https://mpq0dr.axshare.com/#id=cu1uak&p=positioning_test&c=1

I will investigate this bug and work to provide a fix. If I wasn’t clear about anything, please just let me know.
You can track the progress of the bug here:

#81

Thanks srm,
Re: opening in the middle of the page, that is not my desired behavior. The desired behavior would be to have the page open with the art board positioned in the browser top left as it does without the plugin installed. For myself and my team it just doesn’t make sense to have to vertically scroll all the way to the top of the page after it loads. In the sample I shared, you see panel 2 upon the page loading, not panel 1.

Hopefully that makes sense.

Re: the overflow issue, yes, that was another bug that my team noticed as well.

BTW, as I originally mentioned, this is a great tool that I think has been a long time desired feature.

#82

@mojorisen thanks for the feedback! I’ll open another ticket to reconsider how the artboard renders. My goal was to mimic the functionality of Sketch Measure or InVision Inspect, but perhaps that’s not the best approach. What are your thoughts about potentially rendering the artboard zoomed out to fit the whole document in the viewport? Either way, I’ll spend some time thinking through it and if you have any additional feedback, please feel to share.