Archi 1.6 was released on Feb 6th. Since then I’ve been coding off and on for fixes and features for the next version, 1.7. I’d planned to release this at the start of April but I’ve had plenty of other stuff to do as well – coming up to speed with Git, helping out some post-grad students with their project based on Archi, compiling the Developer Wiki, updating the Help documentation, keeping an eye on user emails and feedback, chasing some nasty Eclipse bugs, presenting at various modelling events in the UK, trying to squeeze in a mini break, etc., etc…
Since version 1.6 a lot of code has been added and refactored, take a look at the Git commit log. The only thing left to add for this version is Properties. This is a feature that will let you add arbitrary attributes to an element in a Properties Table; things such as links, keywords, cost, duration, and so on. The values will be free text so it’s up to the user to determine what to do with them and how to interpret them. Hyperlinking is an obvious use case, as is tagging (should really be an option to Search Properties, as well) together with some kind of analysis. Analysis will have to be done by the user in the exported HTML report or by doing something with the *.archimate file (XML). Perhaps we can build on this in later versions. At the very least it should be a useful feature to add some user-defined attributes.
Some other features that are coming in 1.7:
- In-place rename of elements in the Model Tree
- New “Duplicate” command in the Model Tree
- Some View elements can have an alternative figure
- Added a Connection type to the Palette for connections to/from Notes
- The Access Relation type now has properties of “Access”, “Read”, “Write”, and “Read/Write”.
- Added an “Open Recent” files menu
- More…
There are more features and fixes than that, lots of little things. Some of these features took longer to implement than I thought, since I had to juggle all the other demands on my time. Could do with more than one developer…
