I am staring at the blank text document to pen down something genuine and meaningful. But, it is beginning to become apparent to me that writing code is easier. Even then, I am resolute in sharing my experience with Voila 2.0. Voila team will definitely agree with me if I say that each of us had an unforgettable experience with this new version of Voila. Be it Requirements team or Development, Testing or Marketing, one can explain you the meaning of ‘break neck speed’. The schedule varied inversely with the amount of work.
During our earlier days of Voila 2.0 journey, the challenging features and requirements posed many questions. The development and testing guys riled the requirements team with their doubts. The team had a faint idea that they would have to forfeit their weekends. But the team’s enthusiasm has now achieved fruition as the app is already in Top Downloads.
The new features were alluring and the team despite all hurdles was eager to complete the task on time.
Organizer seemed to be a great challenge in Voila 2.0. The team spent extra effort on making things simple with the User Interface as well as the flow on organizing the images tidily. Data security and ease-of-use were considered to put Organizer into action.
Voila went for a face lift and animations add to the element of wow. Web cam feature was useful to play pranks on our teammates.
Many Voila users were very keen on adding multiple images into one. To come up with a neat workflow to execute this feature was a grueling task. Many discussions, many creative ideas were put forward but none of them were able to put the pieces together. Finally ‘Pin’ workflow hit the nail on the head. I personally loved this feature.
To edit properties of multiple selected tools, discussions were again held. We racked our brains to decide which one of the ways to follow to serve the actual purpose. But once the job was done, this emerged as a handy feature. Users using older versions of Voila will find this new feature beneficial.
Having a Web browser in Voila was a cool idea. Though we faced many stumbling blocks on the way, we are happy to complete it just the way we thought we would.
Then came the Guidelines feature. We had a debate on whether all Voilaites required to be guided while drawing tools. But then, people using Voila 2.0 to draw flow charts or class diagrams can make use of this feature in a better way.
Assuming people choose shortcut keys more prominently than menu options, we thought of overriding system shortcut keys and provide hot keys for Capture. The guys developing and testing this feature remained so focused that they termed it ‘Hot cut keys’. Menu capture had a muddy flow in the previous versions of Voila. We had to use our hands and other parts of the body to get it work. Though I have over-dramatized this, on a serious note, users will definitely appreciate the simplified flow in the new version of Voila.
The image Information UI was once located in the Tools/Effects/Organizer palette. Later on, to suit the requirements brilliantly, the Information UI was made to slide across the main Workbench UI. Many additional titbits were added to beautify the product. The UI was tweaked here and there. Last few days of the Voila journey had a heated/tensed atmosphere. Things started breaking all of a sudden. Defects appeared from nowhere. The testing guys had no time to relax even for a moment. Their apprehensiveness gave us heebie-jeebies. Finally when things started falling in place, everything looked appealing.
All work and no play makes Voila a dull team. The fun we had during the completion of Voila 2.0 boosted our spirits and relaxed our moods. We could not miss birthday party celebrations with pastries and gifts, and munching bhondas with cold drinks between our works; we enjoyed the best of our times. With much expectation and eagerness, we released Voila 2.0 on May 4th. Voila! What a journey it was!!!
A Voila 2.0 creation!
Steps taken:
1. Drag-and-dropped the required images into the tray.
2. Edited individual images;
Added edges to some of the images.
Used Shapes, No fill style to give a colored border around some of the images.
Effects were applied to few images.
3. Pinned an image and dropped all other edited images into the pinned image.
4. Edited the pinned image;
Placed the images suitably.
Flipped few images.
Added a callout and edited the text.
5. Placed a nice black border around the image using Shapes ‘No Fill’ style.
Download this creation (.Voila format) and check it yourself!
By,
Sahana
Voila
Guidelines, Image capture, Organizer, Voila
