Quince Pro New Features and Updates

Jason Beres [Infragistics] / Wednesday, January 19, 2011

If you are doing any sort of UI design, you have probably checked out our award winning UX Patterns Explorer, Quince Pro.   Over the past 6 months we've done some big improvements to the feature set of Quince Pro on the collaboration side of the tool.  If you are not familiar with what Quince Pro bring to the table besides UX Patterns, you can watch this great video interview, but in in short, you can think of Quince Pro like this:

Quince Pro is a design review tool which helps multi-disciplined teams review, understand and collaborate before writing code.  It helps to further the design review process, no matter what piece of the process you are involved in.  Quince Pro helps teams focus on the activities, artifacts and capabilities to streamline the understanding of designs, which is critical to building better software.

So what's this new release all about?  Here is a list of some of the new features, and at the tail end of this post there are some links to How-To Videos on Quince Pro.

IG Auto Sales Dashboard Library

New trial customers to Quince Pro now have a reference library that shows of various Quince Pro features, such as Design Boards, Patterns, Threaded Commenting, and more.  This library gives a new user a good overview of Quince Pro features and what it can do for them as a collaborative tool.

 

Design Boards

Design Boards are a key addition to Quince Pro, delivering an experience that allows designers to express visual flow between examples within a private library.  The driver for implementing the Design Board feature is that a private library can get complex as more and more items are added to it.  It is difficult to understand the relationship between items, and how the design flows.  It is also to understand how examples are grouped into logical areas of an application or web site.  With Design Boards, these problems are solved by giving the designer the ability to visually group, compare and illustrate the flow of examples.  

Design Boards include the following features:

  • Group Examples – There’s sometimes a need to just be able to put a group of examples together in a design library.  For instance, someone may want to group pages on a Web site by section, maybe even visually arranging them to communicate relatedness or hierarchy.
  • Compare Examples – People want to be able to put up examples—maybe alternatives or variations on a theme—together in order to compare them visually and/or call out similarities and differences.
  • Illustrate Flow – People want to put examples up that are part of a flow and illustrate the flow from one example to the next. 

 

SharePoint Integration

One of the most common questions that come up around Quince Pro is “how does this work with SharePoint”.  

In this iteration, we have added two pieces of SharePoint functionality:

  • Use SharePoint libraries for your Quince attachments.  No synchronization or copy and paste, and they stay on your servers and use your existing document repository and versioning.
  • Use the Quince Design Library Activity Web Part to keep your colleagues aware of what's going on in your Quince Design Library.

 

Email to Corkboard

Simply copy and paste into your favorite email program and send to Quince!  Your image shows up on your corkboard, and you can mark it up, move it into a design library--whatever you can do with your corkboard examples. You’re able to work with Quince without having to keep Quince open and it’s a great way to quickly send multiple files to Quince at one time.

 

Multiple Upload

Easily select multiple items from your file system and upload them at once--then see which ones are Fresh in your library.  You can add directly to your libraries or even your design boards.

 

Browse Library Examples

When you are viewing a Library Example, there is a new visual browser which lets you quickly switch between examples without having to close the current example, then browse the library to find the example you are looking for.

 

There is a bunch more stuff we've added as well, so to see the entire list, you can go here:

http://es.infragistics.com/innovations/quince.aspx#Quince

And to get the lowdown on how to use Quince Pro, check out these videos:

 

If you have any questions about Quince Pro, feel free to shoot me an email at jasonb@infragistics.com!