I’m pleased to announce a preview release of Blueprint Layout Tool 0.4. This version marks the migration of BLT to its own site at http://www.blueprintlayouttool.com and a focus on dramatic improvements to the source view. Unfortunately, the current development version only supports Firefox, IE, Opera & Safari support will be coming soon.

Key Features:

• Improvements to style and polish of the interface
• Dramatic improvements to source view (Powered by CodePress & PHPTidy)
  • Generated Source is well formatted and polished
  • Generated Source is Syntax Highlighted
  • Generated Source is cleaned of most extraneous markup

Known Issues:

• Source View does not work in Safari and Opera
• Formatting is off in IE
• Generated source contains several Mozilla specific tags that still need to be cleaned.

I would also like to take a few moments and draw your attention to Christian Montoya’s Blueprint Constructor application. He takes a different approach to the interface and design of the Layout Tool and has created something quite useful and fun to use. We will be working together to try and achieve similar conventions between our apps.

Check out Constructor at http://lab.christianmontoya.com/construct/

You can read about his design process on his blog at http://www.christianmontoya.com/2007/12/08/construct-01-alpha/

I’ve made some progress and BLT in the last week and thought it has reached a good point to release for feedback.

New Features

• Border Support
• All columns can be resized by clicking on them (even nested columns)
• All columns can be selected by clicking on them
• New Properties Panel
  • Control Border & Last attributes
  • Change ID on any div
• Improved sorting

Please post your comments below.
Get it online here:

http://www.ajaxbestiary.com/Labs/BLT2/

Known Issues:

• Interface doesn’t work well on narrow screens
• Occasional problems with sorts falling outside of the page
• Output needs dramatic cleanup
• Files need minified & optimized to improve download time & performance
• Issues remain with formatting & .png rendering on IE. I hope to address these ASAP.

This version has been tested in safari 3, FF 2 & IE 7. Please test in other browsers if possible.

I’ve posted a bug fix release to the Layout Tool.

Changes:

• Dramatic improvements to selecting
• Fixed script error for IE 7.

Known Issues:

There are still major issues with IE 7 and it doesn’t work well in IE 6 yet.  If anyone has a clue why the color of the div gets progressively darker in IE 7, I’d appreciate it.

You can testdrive the new version at:

http://www.ajaxbestiary.com/Labs/BLT2/index.htm

It’s up,  I’ve posted a new version of the Blueprint Layout tool to:

 http://www.ajaxbestiary.com/Labs/BLT2/index.htm

You can view my earlier post to see what’s new and different with this version:

http://www.ajaxbestiary.com/2007/11/13/blueprint-layout-tool-progress/ 

Please post any feedback you might have below.

I’ve been working on a new version of the blueprint layout tool over the past few days.  In order to build a foundation for the eventual goal of a wysiwyg, drag & drop editor with semantic markup  I’ve needed to refactor the code & change several behaviors.

Current Status 

• Updated entire engine to Blueprint 0.6
• Ported application from YUI to jQuery
• Implemented multi-select capabilities
• Replaced  nested sorting of elements with explicit group & ungroup functionality
• Added functionality to set & remove “.last” class on columns
• Added Ghosting to sort functionality.

Going forward:

I hope to have the new version posted some time tonight.  I hope to assimilate any major bug fixes & the blueprint grid generator into the next release.  Then I’ll be working on semantify integration.

I’ve begun using a set of visual guides to streamline my blueprint development process.  They are simple png files that I drop into photoshop, illustrator & indesign as layers and then dial down the transparency / set fill color to something visible but not distracting.  I plan on integrating them into the next release of the blueprint layout tool as well.

• Blueprint Layout template with baseline.
• Blueprint Layout Template Without Baseline

I got a bit of work done on version .2 of the Blueprint layout tool.  Some improvements to expect when I release it next week.

• Upgrade to blueprint .6
• prepend & border support
• support for elements other than columns