Gizmox, developer of Visual WebGui, announced the availability of a free preview version of it's VWG 6.4 product. Visual WebGui "allows users to create sophisticated, customized, and creative web user interfaces without the need to code in HTML, CSS, or XAML." The tool also facilitates and supports collaborative work between developers and designers.
Some of the announced features of this release include:
- Point & click, drag & drop developer/designer interfaces that customize UI without writing code
- The ability to customize the UI look and feel using parameters
- The customization of third party controls as well as internal Visual WebGui out-of-the-box controls plus the ability to build controls from scratch
- New scalability extensions for redundancy and mulit-user SaaS/Cloud Computing level
- A visual designer that integrates with existing design software such as Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Expression Blend, Adobe Flash CS, and more to enable the most efficient developer and designer collaboration
The last feature has, perhaps, the most interesting implications.
Charles Humble, in an InfoQ article noted:
...modern GUI design raises both technical and managerial challenges. ... a slick, complex User Interface typically requires a number of different roles – graphics artists, information architects, animators and programmers. Whilst some people may be able to fill all of these, such people are rare; more typically a number of different people will be involved in the process and the flow of resources back and forth between designers and developers can become a significant problem.
Tools that facilitate this collaborative process will be increasingly important. VWG supports designer / developer collaboration by integrating, "with existing design software such as Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Expression Blend, [and] Adobe Flash CS."
Gizmo enjoys a close relationship with Microsoft:
“Microsoft is pleased to work with Visual WebGui to deliver the best computing experience to our customers,” said Joe Marini, Director, Platform & Tools Ecosystem at Microsoft Corp. “The newly added features in Visual WebGui 6.4 preview offer developers a flexible way to brand and differentiate their UIs for internal and customer-facing applications.”
which is mostly unsurprising as Arie Scope, founder and chairman of the board, also founded Microsoft's Israeli subsidiary and served as its General Manager and Chairman for 16 years. This relationship is expressed in VWG's ability to work closely with MS Silverlight and it's placement as the, ".NET RIA and AJAX application platform."
Gizmox is also placing this tool as a Cloud and SaaS development platform.
Most of GizMox's products are available under as open source (LGPL licensing) but the preview version announced this week is covered by a special preview license.