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Creating and Hosting Awesome Axure Libraries

Library Screenshot
Want to make your own Axure libraries? This is a short how-to guide on getting the most out of it.

  1. Plan
    • Choose a central theme.
    • Make a list of widgets that will be included.
    • Determine a common style to use throughout the library. This may include color, grid, typography, interactivity, and copy.
  2. Create
    • Open Axure RP.
    • In the widgets pane on the left, click the “Wireframe” dropdown and choose “Create library…”
    • Save the new document with a short, clear name—this will be the name that shows up in the library droplist for everyone.
    • Create each widget just like you would create new pages in a normal prototype.
  3. Polish
    • Name everything that may be interactive. A dynamic panel for showing a calendar should be named something like “panel – calendar”. A submit button should be something like “button – submit”. This will help your users during annotation and spec generation.
    • Add Rollover, MouseDown, Selected, and Disabled states to interactive shapes like buttons. Right click the object > Edit Button Shape > Edit Rollover Style (etc).
    • Many widgets may contain more than one element. Group them together (ctrl + G) to ensure they don’t get separated when your users move them around.
    • Sort the widgets. This is difficult because you have to do it manually and there is no best sort order. Play around with sorting options, such as alphabetical vs. order or importance, to find what’s right for you. It’s worth the effort.
    • Add custom thumbnails. Another pain-in-the-butt task that will improve the professionalism of your library tenfold. Take your inner icon designer out for a spin and start producing 32 x 32 px thumbnails in .png format. Apply them to widgets by right clicking the Widget > “Widget Properties” > “Import Icon”. Make liberal use of screen grabs. Even your lamest effort at producing an icon will look better than the grainy compressed default that Axure spits out.
    • Add descriptions. I don’t always do this, but for complex widgets, it can be good to explain them a bit. Right click the Widget > “Widget Properties”. Put your description in the text area.
  4. Distribute
    • Hosting .rp / .rplib files is fraught with issues due to their resemblance to .zip files. There is one true method for hosting these things successfully (take my word for it): Put the .rp / .rplib file(s) in a folder, and zip the folder. This is the file you distribute.
  5. Announce

reference from:http://www.acleandesign.com/2010/04/creating-and-hosting-awesome-axure-libraries/

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Axure Better Defaults Library v2

Reference from: http://www.acleandesign.com/2010/04/axure-better-defaults-library-v2/

This is version 2 of the Better Defaults library, expanded to sixty five (or so) interactive and cleanly styled widgets. Use it in place of the standard widget set.

Reasons to use these widgets include:

  • Consistent and improved styling.
  • Polished interactivity.
  • Standardized labeling.
  • Expanded set of shapes & controls.
  • Rollover, MouseDown, Selected, and Disabled styles for most controls.
  • Includes all defaults.

This is for version 5.5 and above. Put the extracted .rplib file in your “My Documents\My Axure RP Libraries\” folder (Windows) or your “Documents\Axure\Libraries” folder (Mac).

Preview |  Download

 

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Axure Better Defaults Library v2

Reference from: http://www.acleandesign.com/2010/04/axure-better-defaults-library-v2/

This is version 2 of the Better Defaults library, expanded to sixty five (or so) interactive and cleanly styled widgets. Use it in place of the standard widget set.

Reasons to use these widgets include:

  • Consistent and improved styling.
  • Polished interactivity.
  • Standardized labeling.
  • Expanded set of shapes & controls.
  • Rollover, MouseDown, Selected, and Disabled styles for most controls.
  • Includes all defaults.

This is for version 5.5 and above. Put the extracted .rplib file in your “My Documents\My Axure RP Libraries\” folder (Windows) or your “Documents\Axure\Libraries” folder (Mac).

Preview |  Download

 

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Top 5 Free SEO iPad Apps

For many of us, the iPad has become our portable business tool of choice. It isn’t uncommon to see multiple people pull out their iPad for notetaking or to a review a website during a meeting.

With that in mind, here are five free essential apps that every SEOshould have on their iPad.

Quick SEO Site Review App

SiteAnalyserSiteAnalyser

Price: Free
iTunes Link:http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/website-seo-analyser/id384402373?mt=8

Multitudes of Firefox and Chrome plug-ins can show you PageRank, inlinks, and more. But sometimes you just need to pull the essential high-level stats from a website. The easier the better.

SiteAnalyser, a free SEO iPhone app, fits the bill. It gives you quick access to PR, links, page size, load time, meta data, header tags, age — basically all the top-level info you might need on the fly in a meeting.

Google Analytics for iPad

Google Analytics iPad

Price: Free (for Lite Version)
iTunes Link:http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/analytics-for-ipad/id373676475?mt=8

This app brings a nice touch interface to the reports that we’re all familiar with from Analytics. The app is pretty powerful. Apart from anything advanced you might be undertaking, this suits the bill pretty well for quickly running a report or showing a client their top keywords or visitors with all the familiar segmenting of metrics that you probably do.

As a nice bonus, double-tapping on any report will bring it up full screen so it’s easier for others to see. The free version only shows you 10 rows of data, and won’t let you export which should be fine for most light reporting on the go. If you need some more advanced features, they unlock for $6.99

RavenTools

RavenTools iPad

Price: Free (RavenTools plans billed seperately)
iTunes Link:http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/raven-tools/id378570397?mt=8

If you have a RavenTools account, then you should definitely keep the companion Raven app on your iPad. It can nicely supplement the Google Analytics app, while giving you some familiar features and tools while you’re on the go.

You can quickly build out a dashboard with modules for review and drilling into any of the modules takes you to the actual report in app. From there you can e-mail, have access to your familiar tools, and do some research.

This might not be as helpful in a meeting, but it’s handy to have while your laptop takes a nap back at the hotel room. Another cool time-saving feature: once you log in, you have access to all the websites in your account.

WordPress for iPad

WordPress iPad

Price: Free
iTunes Link:http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wordpress/id335703880?mt=8

One thing I constantly find myself doing is writing, editing, and optimizing blogs through the magic of WordPress. Now I never expected to get really down and dirty with my optimization efforts through an iPad, but I did expect to be able to do basic maintenance, approve comments, and create blog posts.

Safari on the iPad had different plans, however, so I found myself searching for an app. Lo and behold: WordPress for iPad! It covers your fundamentals (and multiple blogs) quite nicely and has become quite essential while traveling.

VNC

VNC iPad

Price: Free
iTunes Link:http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mocha-vnc-lite/id284984448?mt=8

If there’s one thing you’re bound to do from time to time, it’s forget something at the office. Usually, this happens at the least opportune moment possible and creates an instant headache.

Unless you have everything in the cloud, you might find yourself with lingering ties to the desktop. When these moments happen, I have a free VNC server running in the background on my Windows machine.

For an iPad client, I’ve been quite happy with using Mocha VNC Lite. It does everything I would want it to do and gives instant access to my desktop from hundreds of miles away. Additionally, should you ever have a need to view a Flash website from your iPad and you find yourself cursing Steve Jobs under your breath, you can use VNC as a workaround.

 

Reference from:http://searchenginewatch.com/3641862

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Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES)

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is a highly scalable and cost-effective bulk and transactional email-sending service for businesses and developers. Amazon SES eliminates the complexity and expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service. The service integrates with other AWS services, making it easy to send emails from applications being hosted on services such as Amazon EC2. With Amazon SES there is no long-term commitment, minimum spend or negotiation required – businesses can utilize a free usage tier and after that enjoy low fees for the number of emails sent plus data transfer fees.

Building large-scale email solutions to send marketing and transactional messages is often a complex and costly challenge for businesses. To optimize the percentage of emails that are successfully delivered, businesses must deal with hassles such as email server management, network configuration, and meeting rigorous Internet Service Provider (ISP) standards for email content. Additionally, many third-party email solutions require contract and price negotiations, as well as significant up-front costs.

Amazon SES eliminates these challenges and enables businesses to benefit from the years of experience and sophisticated email infrastructure Amazon.com has built to serve its own large-scale customer base. Through a simple API call, businesses can now access a high-quality, scalable email infrastructure to efficiently and inexpensively communicate to their customers. For high email deliverability, Amazon SES uses content filtering technologies to scan a business’s outgoing email messages to help ensure that the content meets ISP standards. The email message is then either queued for sending or routed back to the sender for corrective action. To help businesses further improve the quality of email communications with their customers, Amazon SES provides a built-in feedback loop, which includes notifications of bounce backs, failed and successful delivery attempts, and spam complaints.

Reference from: http://aws.amazon.com/ses/