Book Image

Axure RP Prototyping Cookbook

By : John Henry Krahenbuhl
Book Image

Axure RP Prototyping Cookbook

By: John Henry Krahenbuhl

Overview of this book

<p>Axure has quickly become one of the leading tools for rapid prototyping in use today. Driving Axure’s popularity and wide spread adoption is the ability to iteratively develop interactive HTML prototypes of websites and applications. With the AxShare cloud-based service, prototypes are easily shared amongst clients and team members. Prototypes can even be viewed on Android, iPhone, and iPad, appearing like a native application.</p> <p>This guide provides fast, practical, step-by-step recipes to create your own custom prototypes for mobile and desktop. You can now easily create your mobile-first designs as well as responsive and adaptive web design interactions. Using real-world examples developed from today’s hottest technological trends, you can take your skills to the next level!</p> <p>This book takes you through the latest methods to create Adaptive Web Layouts (AWD) with Axure RP 7 Pro, and create widgets for Responsive Web Layouts (RWD). Prototyping for mobiles will now be easier as you will be able to include jQuery Mobile into your Axure Prototypes. You will learn to connect to Social Media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest and create ecommerce order checkout flows to make your prototypes come to life. With this book and Axure RP Pro, you will witness increased productivity in your team by leveraging Axure Team Projects.</p> <p>You will see how to create custom templates for specifications to impress your clients, create Masters and build your own custom Widget libraries. You will learn to use AxShare to quickly share password protected prototypes with clients and teammates, and explore integrate Axure Prototypes with external JavaScript Libraries.</p> <p>Finally, you will be able to setup Android and iPad/iPhone emulators to quickly view your prototypes and run them native on Android, iOS and Windows 8.1 devices. By applying the recipes in "Axure RP Prototyping Cookbook", your prototypes on your iPhone, iPad, Android device, or browser will have never looked better!</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Axure RP Prototyping Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Preface

Axure has rapidly become one of the leading tools for rapid prototyping in use today. There are many reasons for Axure's popularity. You can easily create wireframes as well as generate specification documentation. Axure also provides the ability to quickly develop prototypes that can be leveraged in web browsers or as native Android, iPhone, or iPad applications. It is no wonder that Axure has become the tool of choice for a large percentage of the Fortune 100 corporations as well as User Experience professionals worldwide.

This book provides fast, practical, step-by-step recipes to create your own custom prototypes for mobile and desktop. You can now easily create your mobile-first designs as well as responsive and adaptive web design interactions. Using real-world examples developed from today's hottest technological trends, you can take your skills to the next level!

You will learn how to create custom templates for specifications to impress your clients, create Masters, and build your own custom widget libraries. You will also learn to use AxShare to quickly share password-protected prototypes with clients and teammates, and explore integrate Axure prototypes with external JavaScript libraries.

With the latest enhancements in Axure RP 7, you can easily design Adaptive Web Layouts (AWD) as well as create widgets for Responsive Web Layouts (RWD). You will learn how to include jQuery Mobile in Axure prototypes; connect to social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest; and create e-commerce order checkout flows to make your prototypes come to life. With this book and Axure RP Pro, you will witness increased productivity in your team by leveraging Axure team projects.

There are plentiful resources available to assist you no matter what your skill level. With a passionate community and exceptional technical support, any question you may have regarding Axure will quickly be answered. Visit http://www.axure.com/community for access to widget libraries, the Axure forum, and more resources. Welcome to the Axure community and enjoy your journey!

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Prototyping Recipes, introduces methods to bring paper prototypes to life, create a dynamic Breadcrumb Master, create a carousel, and build a fixed Contact Us widget.

Chapter 2, Enhanced Prototyping Recipes, covers using external HTML and CSS in your prototypes, using inline frames to embed YouTube and Vimeo video sources, and making active connections to social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

Chapter 3, Specifications, explains how to customize specifications and standardize annotations.

Chapter 4, Wireframes and Design, introduces reusable custom Masters and libraries.

Chapter 5, E-commerce Solutions, covers business-to-business and business-to-consumer fundamentals, checkout flows, and prototyping examples.

Chapter 6, Using Axure in Teams, explains how to manage shared projects, work with version control, and streamline collaborative workflows.

Chapter 7, Adaptive and Responsive Web Design with Axure, introduces responsive design, jQuery media queries, and jQuery Mobile.

Chapter 8, Prototyping for Mobile, covers optimizing prototypes to be viewed as native Android, iPhone, or iPad applications as well as native web browsers.

Chapter 9, Miscellaneous Explorations, explains how to set up SDKs for mobile platforms as well as how to set up an equivalent LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) environment for prototyping.

What you need for this book

You will need Axure RP 7, an Internet connection, and a desire to enhance your prototyping abilities. If you do not currently have Axure, please visit http://www.axure.com to download a free trial version.

Note

A few recipes will also require Axure RP 7 Pro, a graphics editing program (for example, Adobe Photoshop), and a word processing program that can open Microsoft Word formatted documents (for example, MS Word).

Who this book is for

This book is suitable for you if you are a User Experience professional, designer, information architect, or business analyst who wants to gain advanced prototyping skills with Axure. You can also use this book if you have some experience with prototyping and want to take your prototypes to the next level.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "In your prototype directory, open start.html in a browser to view the prototype."

A block of code is set as follows:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName svn.yourserver.com
  <Location /repos>
    DAV svn
    SVNListParentPath on
    SVNParentPath /svn/repos/
    AuthType Basic
    AuthName "Authorization Realm"
    AuthUserFile /etc/auth-file-svn
    Require valid-user
  </Location>
</VirtualHost>

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

sudo chown www-data:www-data /svn

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Click on the Launch button to start the instance.

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

Reader feedback

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To send us general feedback, simply send an e-mail to and mention the book title via the subject of your message.

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Downloading the example code

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Questions

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