Axure RP 11 Beta Released

And as usual, I made a brief overview of its new functions and capabilities.

In short: there are not enough innovations to justify assigning it a new number.

Although most of the new features are quite useful. Some will speed up the work of a designer who quickly sketches out prototypes. Some will allow those who look more at the design to add more beauty. And some will add more dynamic components to prototypes, useful for testing on a live audience.

Below the cut is my video review and a text list of the main innovations.

First, a video. Nowadays, you have to refer to YouTube.

And to Contact.

So, how did it go? I got an email from Akshura letting me know that a new beta version had been released with a bunch of cool stuff inside.

The version is free for everyone, regardless of the presence of old subscriptions. And this free status will remain until the program leaves beta.

Then there was a text list of the main innovations and link to landing page. On the landing page there is the same list, but accompanied by pictures and annotations, as well as a link to download the executable file.

So, what are these innovations?

Ability to quickly search through widgets and styles without being distracted from the keyboard.

If earlier, to add a widget to the screen, you had to drag it out of the widget list, now you just need to press “/” and enter the name of the desired widget in the search field that appears. After confirming the selection, it will be added to the middle of the screen. Convenient and fast, I approve. It will especially help with searching for icons.

View all pages and components of the prototype as a gallery.

Doesn't this remind you of anything?

A new action has appeared among the events: changing the style of a widget.

Now you can make it so that when you click on a green rectangle, it turns blue.

Ability to temporarily disable events or actions for a widget.

This is useful when the designer is going through the options, playing around with different events when clicking on an element. Now you can experiment without creating copies of these elements, and do everything within one, arbitrarily turning off and on different events and actions within them.

Finally, it became possible to access components (these are the ones that were previously called masters) in the event panel.

In fact, I wasn't really upset about the lack of this option before, because I always came up with some kind of crutches to get around the restriction. Well, now you don't have to use crutches.

And now you can also attach events to the components themselves.

Same thing: I get along just fine without this option. But why not?

It is now possible to create animations.

Now you can control the speed of the widget's transition from one state to another. And in addition to the usual rotations and scrolling, it is now possible to change the size of an element or its position in space. Cool innovations for those who want to add dynamics to prototypes.

Grid distribution

Whatever that means. Basically, when we have multiple elements on the screen, we can distribute them evenly horizontally or vertically. This feature has always been there. Now we have the ability to distribute them on a grid. I've done some experiments and the results are pretty unpredictable so far.

But now there is control over the distance between several elements, evenly distributed among themselves.

Convenient, useful. Everything is like in Figma. Oh, and there's also an option to swap such distributed elements around by dragging them by the six pink dots.

A style has been added that allows you to blur the contents of the widget.

Or everything that is located behind the widget.

That's basically all there is to pay attention to. While I was researching the new version of the program, I really got into a nostalgic mood. After all, this tool is becoming less and less popular among designers, judging by search queries. But I hope that someday it will compete with Figma, which has become the new industry standard.

However, this is what scares me. The fight with Figma. With each new version in recent years, it has been clear that Akshura is running after Figma, although, in my opinion, it should have its own path. Akshura is a good tool for those who not only think in scenarios, but also demonstrate the results of their work in the form of well-thought-out visualized scenarios ready for testing. And ready for quick and easy edits to them. Interconnected screens, maximum freedom of action, emulation of fairly complex user interactions with the interface, all that. Let them (the interfaces) not be as beautiful as the designs in Figma – we never expected this from Akshura.

Useful links:

Axure Vkontakte Group. As Axure's popularity has fallen, so has the group's relevance. But every now and then someone comes with a question about working in the program, and I make another training video.

Axure Tutorials in the Proektorata knowledge base.

Mini-course by Anton Grigoriev: Axure 7 for beginners in 100 minutes.

Well, that's mine too. Telegram channelIt's about interface design and freelancing.