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SB Re-launch!

February 24th, 2010

After months of hard work and gallons of caffeine draining , we are now excited to announce the very new SchemaBank!

In additions to various new features in our very original web-based SB Designer. We have added an array of community features, namely:

  • The Project Home Page
    • each project has its own home page showing all diagrams and schema details of the committed (aka published) versions
    • visitors can follow a project and receive daily updates on its activities
    • visitors can start and join discussion on the project home page
    • authors can tag the schema and visitors can search schema projects by tags
    • and many more!
  • The Gallery
    • showing all public projects where visitors can now collaborate in full strength with the project author
    • carrying the searchable tag cloud of all public projects
    • let you search for all public projects (and those private projects that you have read access), down to field level!
  • My Models
    • a handy place to create new projects and manage your existing ones
    • listing all public and private projects that you have read and write access, whether you are the author, a collaborator or a follower
    • showing your activity history in SB
  • User Public Profile
    • each SB registered user now have their dedicated public profile carrying their basic bio (optional) and the public projects (and their corresponding activities) that they create and follow
    • and we now automatically grab your avatar from Gravatar

There’s so much more to tell about the new features and keep an eye on our blog  for the latest development!

Cheers ~~

Announcement, New Features ,

Undo History

November 18th, 2009

Today we would like to introduce you a big handy feature: Undo History.

You can now easily undo actions you’ve made to the ERD pane. Or ‘redo’ the cancelled ones when you change your mind.

The undo history window keeps the 100 most current actions. You can click on the Undo button once at a time, or click on the exact action you want to revert to.

ani-undo

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Lock or Unlock?

November 11th, 2009

Sometimes, the obvious isn’t quite so obvious.

Shall we let you resize freely the size (i.e. height and width) of each entity? That sounds quite flexible. But, you would have to resize your entity every time when you make changes to it.

Or shall we lock the size and let it grow automatically along side with its attributes? But some people might want to show only 5 of the 99 attributes in 1 of his 109 entities.

To give the best of the both world, we now support locking height and width down to a per-entity basis. By default, all entities will grow (or shrink) along with adding (or removing) attributes. If you want to lock the size of any particular entity, just click on the pin button on its upper-right-hand corner.

Problem solved!

lock-n-unlock

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New Icon Set

November 7th, 2009

We have just replaced the menu buttons for drawing entities and relationships with graphical icons.

Why?

Because it looks nice; and to make room for upcoming new features!

new-icon-set

New Features , ,

Color Box and Text Label

November 6th, 2009

When your model’s schema grows, very often you may want to group them visually so that your readers will find it easier to comprehend your design.

You can now do so and choose the color of the border and the background.

You can also put text into the box set its color and size to your likings!

color-box

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Keyboard Shortcuts

November 2nd, 2009

To help your speedy navigation around the ERD pane, we have introduced the following keyboard shortcuts:

  • the Del button: to delete selected objects in ERD pane
  • Ctrl-A: to select all entities
  • Ctrl-S: to save the current work
  • E: to add a new entity

And don’t forget that you can select multiple entities by holding the Ctrl key!

New Features , ,

Multiple Select

November 2nd, 2009

We now support selecting multiple entities by

  • holding the Control key on the keyboard
  • or, drag to select a region to select the entities within

You can then move and delete the selected entities in bulk.

ani-multi-select

New Features , ,

The Fast Forward Button

October 14th, 2009

Helping you to create a nice entity-relationship diagram for your application model is our job. But it wouldn’t be so nice if it took you too many clicks to generate SQL CREATE and ALTER statements (aka Forward Engineering).

In the past, the only way to do that would be clicking on the Version Manager tab, then right-clicking on a version, then, and then and then…

Not anymore!

Introduce the Generate SQL speed button on the menu bar. Click on it to select whether you want CREATE statements or ALTER statements.

speed-sql

CREATE Statements

You can generate CREATE statements based on your current work or any previous version of work. SB will also ask you to commit your work into version manager if you choose to use your current work for the script, so that you can always retrieve the corresponding diagram of any scripts you run on your database.

gen-sql-create-small

ALTER Statements

First, you will choose what version of  work you want to migrate your database to.

gen-sql-alter-1-small

Then, choose the version your database is running at currently:

gen-sql-alter-2-small

Go go go, go try it fast!

New Features , ,

Bird’s View Improved

October 14th, 2009

We have users asking for a larger canvas and better bird’s view support. And here we go: we’ve added 4 more pages of 3,000 x 3,000 px canvas with pagination support in bird’s view.

So now you can keep adding more and more entities to your database model for your ever-growing application!

ani-bird

New Features , ,

Maximizing the ERD Pane

October 5th, 2009

Some of you using a netbook with a tiny screen might find it too expensive to keep showing the top info bar – the region that shows the project title, owner information, logout link, etc. Now you can hide it by clicking View > Top Info Bar under the menu.

The bar will be shown again under these circumstances:

hide_top_info_bar

Another interesting improvement: the menu bar will now flow nicely if the screen size is not enough to display all menu buttons:

overflow-menubar

Enjoy!

New Features , ,