iStudio Publisher Development Roadmap

eleased with iStudio Publisher Version 1.1.4 on 15th June, 2010.

About this Roadmap

iStudio Publisher Version 1 was released on 6th January, 2009 at the Macworld Conference and Expo in San Francisco.

Over the coming weeks, months and years, we will be adding many more features to iStudio Publisher. There will be three different types of release, as follows:

Major release = Version x (e.g. Version 1, 2, 3, etc.)
Minor release = Version x.y (e.g. Version 1.1, 1.2, 1.3,... 2.1, 2.2, etc.)
Maintenance release = Version x.y.z (e.g. Version 1.0.1, 1.0.2, 1.0.3,... 1.1.1, 1.1.2, etc.)

Our upgrade policy is to provide our Version 1 users with all (1.x) minor releases and all (1.x.y) maintenance releases FREE of charge. Furthermore, all major releases of iStudio Publisher (i.e. Version 2, Version 3, etc.) will be made available to existing customers at a reduced 'upgrade' price compared to the full purchase price.

This Roadmap is designed to tell you about the improvements and new features that are already planned. If your favorite "must-have" feature is missing, please contact support and submit a feature request and we'll do our best to include it in a future release. We very much welcome receiving all of your requests, comments and ideas, which help to steer our product development program.

Please note that this Roadmap represents our "current plan", which we will reassess and fine-tune frequently. We will include an updated Roadmap with every new release of the software.

iStudio Publisher includes an automatic update mechanism, so there's no need to keep checking our website for the latest version. Once you have installed the application for the first time, you will be automatically notified whenever a new version becomes available - simply accept each update when offered.

iStudio Publisher Version 1.2 (Free update)

New Features

• New image sizing option "Stretch with Shape", for convenient scaling of cropped images.
• Changing the shape of existing shapes.
• Checkbox option to draw Shape Library shapes as "text shapes" (with no line stroke and no solid fill).
• New persistent selection mode for Shape Library shapes, to enable repeated usage without reselection.
• Keystroke constraints for sizing shapes and images, including proportional resizing and resizing from the center.
• Pointer Tool double click on shape corner handles to toggle between proportional/disproportional sizing.
• Sizing shapes and images using the mouse scroll wheel.
• Extracting shapes from glyphs (text characters), to enable shape editing effects to be applied; line stroke, color/gradient fill, image, rotation angle, shape distortion, etc.
• A range of image export options, including: whole page export, export area and export shape; to different image formats, including: png, gif, jpeg, tiff.
• Guides.
• Font menu dynamic preview of font styles whilst traversing the menu.

Changes and Fixes

• Add alternative ways of drawing Shape Library shapes.
• Make modifying the page size a reversible operation.
• Inspector sliders and steppers generate a stream of commands - prevent these from being added to the Undo log.
• Enable Undo of shape attribute settings to cope with grouped shapes with mixed settings.
• Add Save point to the Undo/Redo list.
• After undoing all changes, the document remains in an edited state - fix this to return the doc to unedited.

iStudio Publisher Version 1.3 (Free update)

New Features

• Spelling checker underlines errors as you type.
• Find and replace.
• Manual adjustment of text first line offset from top of shape container.
• Importing text with filter options.
• Inserting special characters e.g. whitespace.
• Import/input filter to automatically replace straight quotes with curly (typographer's) quotes.
• Filter options for importing text.
• Text menu Change Case sub-menu, with options lower case, UPPER CASE, Sentence case, Title Case, and tOGGLE cASE.

Changes and Fixes

• Change flow linking so that any existing text in a target container is appended to any existing text in the source container instead of being deleted.
• Auto-leading fix, to make automatic adjustment of line spacing the default behavior for all text selection cases.

iStudio Publisher Version 1.4 (Free update)

New Features

• Adjustable tab stops.
• Bullets and numbering.

iStudio Publisher Version 1.5 (Free update)

New Features

• Named Character and Paragraph styles. Style catalogues.
• More keyboard shortcuts for moving around in text and for selecting text.
• More standard keystroke shortcuts.

iStudio Publisher Version 1.6 (Free update)

New Features

• Configuration options / user preferences / application preferences.
• Saving window configuration and layout in user preferences.
• Checking updates, configuration, frequency, saving in preferences.

iStudio Publisher Version 1.6.1 (Free update)

Changes and Fixes

• When editing without a license, show the unsaved changes asterisk and on closing the document show an unsaved changes warning dialog.
• Improve grid configuration.
• Add ruler zero point adjustment.
• Improve document loading.
• Fix rotation knobs not zeroing correctly.
• Add more logarithmic sliders, notably those for text indents and spacings.
• Fix erroneous scaling of a group of several shapes when some of them are rotated.
• Fix for Rotation Tool moving all shapes rather than one.

iStudio Publisher Version 1.7 (Free update)

New Features

• Page reordering - available as page drag and drop in the Thumbnails Navigator and also via new controls in the Page / Spread Inspector.
• Slider for zooming the main document view.
• Zoom menu.
• Add support for output to PDF/X-1a.
• Bleeds.
• Dragging margins.
• Dragging columns and gutters (maybe a new tool?).
• Blinking cursor.
• Automatic kerning support (at least on Leopard).
• Manual kerning support.
• Labelling of flow linking - sequence numbers, visual connecting lines.
• Vertical text alignment (top, middle, or bottom).
• Vertical justification (to align columns of text evenly).

Changes and Fixes

• Fix runarounds and insets to cope with self-intersecting shapes.
• Add scribble smoothing (of scribbles created using the Freehand Scribble Tool).

iStudio Publisher Version 1.8 (Free update)

New Features

• Right-click contextual menus.
• Intelligent shape behavior.
• Custom handles on shapes.
• A heads-up display or inspector for each shape type.
• Logical operations on combinations of shapes (OR, AND, etc.).
• Node editing (adding/removing vertices, smoothing curves, etc.).

iStudio Publisher Version 1.9 (Free update)

New Features

• Font handling:
  • menu operation / design
  • control operation / splitting out typeface and weight
  • better display of base name and postscript extension on a flyout menu
  • most recently used fonts at the top of the menu
  • 2-level font menu

Changes and Fixes

• Speed increases across the board.
• Fix large shadows causing the application to slow down, especially at high zoom factors.
• Speed up the following, which are slow for complex shapes and documents:
  • loading documents, particularly with big images
  • navigator selection
  • rendering with the navigator on
  • multi-page rendering
  • scrolling
  • Bezier curve rendering and output
  • image handling - better caching and scaling
  • resizing and editing containers and flows
  • running long flows around shapes, in real time
  • runaround calculations for groups of shapes (look at all commands that affect runarounds)
  • editing long paragraphs
  • live resize
  • typing on top of a large image
  • selection of text superimposed over tiled images
  • insets - curve fitting
  • grouping and ungrouping

LATER VERSIONS of iStudio Publisher

NOTE: The features listed in this section are waiting to be scheduled to a particular version. We may promote some of them to the existing scheduled versions (1.9 and earlier), depending on user request levels and how well their development would fit with other scheduled developments.

New Features

• Baseline grid.
• Tables.
• Image effects - Quartz filters.
• Image reflections.
• Quick Look support.
• iPhoto integration.
• Spotlight integration.
• Contextual toolbars for graphics / text.
• Glyph effects - rotate / flip / skew / baseline offset.
• Boolean geometry operations on paths.
• Paths:
  • control of flow endpoints / flow direction
  • dragging endpoints
  • labelling and editing
• Configurable auto-sizing inspectors - choose which to see, in what order.
• Inspector / information panel / status bar for reporting selection / cursor values, Unicode values.
• Mouse Inspector - mouse positions.
• Lasso Tool with smooth zoom.
• Make overall shapes opacity optionally include the text.
• Smooth zoom when zooming to page / spread / shape.
• Extracting paths from constrained shapes - the result being fully editable.
• Undo / Redo - Named undo methods.
• Undo / Redo - Repeat last command (where applicable).
• More grid controls and settings.
• Document variables.
• Document meta information.
• Incremental changes to line spacing, tracking, paragraph spacing, etc., via keystrokes and/or Inspector controls.
• Quick way to create a text frame the size of the margin inner region.
• Add more shapes to the Shape Library including Flow Chart shapes.
• Duplicating pages.
• Hanging punctuation control.
• Capitalisation control.
• Small Caps support.
• Drop Caps support.
• Piecewise curve editor to edit the individual nodes of a freehand curve, e.g. changing the type of node, and adding and removing nodes.
• Better master page support.
• Advanced typography controls (word spacing).
• Importing from other Application Formats.
• Picking the reference shape when multiples are selected, for aligning.
• Text highlighting - background colors for characters and paragraphs.
• Widows and orphans.
• Clipart.
• Templates.
• Multi-language GUI (Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia, Middle East).
• Multi-language content.
• Internal support for layout of non-Western and complex scripts, including:
  • bidirectional embedding
  • right-to-left scripts
  • diacritic stacking
  • normalisation of codepoints, combining characters
  • grapheme clusters
  • contextual glyph substitution
  • spelling and hyphenation support
• Driving the application purely from the keyboard.
• Standard shading patterns.
• Shading textures.
• Distribute multiple shapes in pre-set pattern formations, for example: tiled, equidistant from a centre
• point, others.
• Support for users to add user defined shapes to the Shape Library.
• Inserting Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) as non-editable image files.
• Improved support for inserting multi-page PDF files, including page ranges.