Adding the swipr menu to your documents

As you may or may not know, swipr comes with a number of menus (main menu and context menus). However, these are generally disabled when you first start to use swipr. To use the swipr menus in your documents, you will have to manually set the reference to the swipr stencil for each of your documents. I have not yet found a way to do this programmatically. And somehow, this reference is lost once you close your document. Through the help of Martijn van Welie (of interaction pattern fame), there now is a way to save the reference with your document. You still have to set it manually, but after that, it will be saved!

Just follow these 10 easy steps to enjoy everlasting swipr menus in your documents.

1. Open your document. Let's reference this document as MyDoc.vsd from now on.


2. Open the swipr stencil within your document (File -> Shapes -> My Shapes -> swipr_sfwf_070)


3. Open the VBA editor (Tools -> Macros -> Visual Basic Editor, or Alt-F11)


4. In the VBA editor, select your document in the project explorer (left top of the VBA interface)


5. Open the wireframe document by double-clicking the ThisObject object.




6. Open the dropdown labeled '(General)' and select 'Document' here. Some code will appear in the main window, don't worry about that.


7. Still in the VBA editor, open the references dialog (Tools -> References) and locate the swipr stencil in there.



8. Add the reference to the stencil by ticking the box for the swipr stencil, and close the references dialog


9. Close the VBA editor (it will automatically save)


10. Save your document (MyDoc.vsd). It should now have all the swipr menus (check to see if they work).

Main menu:


Context menu document explorer:



Context menu page tabs:



Context menu drawing:















Hope you will enjoy using the swipr menus!

swipr site back online!

After an embarrassingly long time of being offline, the swipr site is finally back online. The forum and the documentation have been migrated with the new site, so sme things look a little different. Also, be patient while the documentation loads, this sometimes takes quite a bit of time. A big 'thank you' to Victor for working on this and making sure the site was live before the EuroIA conference that's going on as I type.

Anyway, have a look at it, and please, if you have questions, suggestion or just want to help and make the documentation or swipr itself better, let me know! You can use the forums and of course email me.

Jacco

swipr site is down

[It's all fixed now. Finally. So forget all the links in this blog post. Jacco]

As you may have noticed, the official swipr site (www.swipr.com) is down. This has to do with some security issues surrounding the Mambo CMS.

I am working on resolving all of this, but in the meantime, the documentation and support parts are up and running:

• swipr docs


• swipr forum

Furthermore, I'm looking into another way of setting up a swipr site, for instance using Google Groups or SourceForge. If you have any ideas, suggestions and help to offer around this, please let me know!


Cheers,

Jacco

Free swipr workshops in Las Vegas & Washington

As you may or may not know, the IA Summit 2007 will be held in Las Vegas, from the 22nd to the 26th of March. And I will be there, attending both pre conference workshops and the conference itself. The IA Summit has been very inspiring for me over the last couple of years, and the warm reception of swipr´s predecessor in Austin in 2004 has been a very important driver for me to create swipr and make it available to the IA community.

For this conference, I have proposed a free workshop to help people get started with swipr, but unfortunately, it was not accepted. This was partly because it was a proposal for a half-day pre-conference workshop, but free of charge. This doesn't fit with the normal way the pre-conf workshops are treated. However, I would still like to do some form of swipr promotion during the conference. So, if you are coming to the IA Summit, what would you like to see?

- Basic installation & setup of swipr;
- Examples of how to work with swipr;
- Help with your current problems involving swipr;
- Information on how to extend swipr with extra possibilities;
- Any other stuff you can think about.

If you are attending the Summit, and would like to get together to discuss any of the items mentioned, or anything else, please let me know, and also let me know when you would like to meet up. It seems that most of my Friday will be free, and there will be possibilities around Summit sessions aswell. As soon as I get an idea of how many people would like to see swipr, I can start to set up some sessions.

Also, I will be travelling back to Amsterdam via Washington. If anyone overthere is interested in a swipr presentation or workshop, let me know. I might be able to arrange something on the Thursday or Friday (29/30) after the IA Summit, if you're interested.

Hope to see you in Vegas or Washington!

Jacco Nieuwland
(info _at_ swipr.com)

Creating a prototype with swipr

First of all, a very happy and succesful 2007 to all of you!

I've had a number of questions about how to create an actual prototype with swipr. The normal output is a clickable version of the sitemap or screenflow, with popups for all the wireframes. Within the popup window it is possible to jump from wireframe to wireframe, but people would like to show the prototype in a normal browser window, instead of in the popup. Of course, this is possible, and I'll show you how to do this here.

In the 'normal' export of swipr, a popup window is launched everytime the user clicks on one of the screen elements in the swipr screenflow/sitemap. This window opens the file fd_popup.htm with the screennumber as its argument.

To have a prototype that does not work in popup screens, you will need a new copy of the fd_popup.htm. This is a very stripped-down version of the original, without any of the tabs to show additional information. The only thing this new version does is load the correct wireframe image, plus it's related imagemap, based on the screennumber argument. This means yu will always need to start your prototype with a call to this new fd_popup and a valid screen number as its argument.

The way I normally do this is by creating a new 'prototype' directory on the same level as the wireframes and comments directories. You place the new and stripped-down version of fd_popup.htm. Then, you edit the title page for the swipr screenflow. This page normally contains a link to page 00 (or whatever is the first page in your sitemap/screenflow). You can add a new link to open the first page of your prototype. (see image below).


This will open the first page in the same browser window, and WILL NOT have any of the tabs that a 'normal' swipr wireframe has. An example can be found on the swipr website.

I hope this will help you in creating a proper prototype using swipr.