Archi 4.9 Early Access

Started by Phil Beauvoir, June 30, 2021, 16:20:33 PM

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Phil Beauvoir

Hi all,

JB and I have been working on the next version of Archi, version 4.9, for a few months now and we're ready to share an alpha version of this to get your feedback.

The main focus of Archi 4.9 is to try and support Specialization of concepts with associated images (icons). There are also some other features and fixes that you can read about in the change log:

https://www.archimatetool.com/downloads/beta/change-log.txt

Here's the GitHub issue where we discuss the main feature:

https://github.com/archimatetool/archi/issues/705

And here's the GitHub issue where we discuss what still needs to be done:

https://github.com/archimatetool/archi/issues/740

You can download it here:

https://www.archimatetool.com/beta/

Please don't test this on real models! Create some temporary models to use.

As there's still more to be done, and the User Guide has not been updated yet, here's a quick start to using Specializations and images:

1. Open the Specializations Manager from the "Tools" menu
2. In the Specializations Manager add new Specializations assigning concept types and images to use for icons (best to use small icon size images)
3. Once these have been defined select a concept and in the Properties window, assign a Specialization from the drop-down box in the "Main" tab. If the drop-down has only a "(none)" selection then you need to create a new Specialization for that concept type.
4. When selecting an element in a View there is an "Image" tab where you can set whether to show the ArchiMate icon, whether to use the image as defined in the Specialization or a custom image. If "Custom" then you can select the image to show from the image chooser (same as for Canvas objects). You can also set the image position or "fill".
5. You can set these image properties on a per-instance basis for each instance of the concept in a View.

Regards,

Phil
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Xiaoqi

Hello Phil,

Thanks a lot and have installed this 4.9.0, no problem to open my existing model. And nice to see the Image tab added and can show the image to the element in view, via custom. Will further testing other great features.

Regards,
Xiaoqi

wiebow

I've been playing a bit with the new feature, and so far it all seems to be working very well. This will really help me communicate a bit more with Archimate as I can tune the icons to something more understandable for my public.

Now, of course, the hunt is on to find some nice icons that
a) display well
b) are clear in their meaning
c) don't clash with the archimate display, so it will gel together

Phil Beauvoir

Hi all,

I've released a new Early Access version of this, Archi 4.9 EA1.

Changes are noted here:

https://www.archimatetool.com/downloads/beta/change-log.txt

And you can download it here:

https://www.archimatetool.com/beta/

Remember - don't test this on real models! Create some temporary models to use.

Regards,

Phil
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Ask your ArchiMate related questions to the ArchiMate Community's Discussion Board.

Manj75

Just installed it and the new image feature for ArchiMate concepts works well - I've previously used Herve's specialisation plug-in so it is nice to now see this natively supported.

The only comment for improvement is that the listed image types does not support SVG files, can this be added.

As you will see Microsoft Azure architecture icons are available in svg files, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/icons/.

Would be a pain to have to convert them to a file type that is supported.

Phil Beauvoir

Quote from: Manj75 on August 10, 2021, 15:08:42 PM
Just installed it and the new image feature for ArchiMate concepts works well - I've previously used Herve's specialisation plug-in so it is nice to now see this natively supported.

The only comment for improvement is that the listed image types does not support SVG files, can this be added.

As you will see Microsoft Azure architecture icons are available in svg files, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/icons/.

Would be a pain to have to convert them to a file type that is supported.

Unfortunately, displaying SVG natively is not supported by Eclipse's Draw2d figures.
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Manj75

Hi Phil,

Thanks for the update seems I'll have to batch convert the icon set.  I also downloaded the AWS and GCP icons available in .png the issue I see is that without any modification to the images adding to a concept appears quite large, which I suspect is the native icon size as supplied.

It would be nice to have a scaling feature to scale down/up the size of the image.  This could be through a slider and editable percentage for the size similar to the zoom function.

Without such a feature we'll have go through and resize each and every image to be used.

Btw, I read through some exciting proposals from JB and you, especially the post from JB https://github.com/archimatetool/archi/issues/705#issuecomment-769832800

JB - if you see this, on your post at the link given you show a Toolbox view creation for pattern based palette, but how did you get the image in the view and toolbox concepts positioned like that?  Are you using Herve's Specialisation plug-in?

Thanks

Jean-Baptiste Sarrodie

Hi,

Quote from: Manj75 on August 10, 2021, 15:49:22 PM
Btw, I read through some exciting proposals from JB and you, especially the post from JB https://github.com/archimatetool/archi/issues/705#issuecomment-769832800

JB - if you see this, on your post at the link given you show a Toolbox view creation for pattern based palette, but how did you get the image in the view and toolbox concepts positioned like that?  Are you using Herve's Specialisation plug-in?

If you speak about my example using AWS icon set, It doesn't use Herve's plugin but the new, native implementation. I simply configured the image position to top-centered and the text position to bottom-centered.

Regards,

JB
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Manj75

This is great to hear - I look forward to the next beta release to check it out.

Phil Beauvoir

#9
Hi,

I've released a new Early Access version, Archi 4.9 EA2.

Changes are noted here:

https://www.archimatetool.com/downloads/beta/change-log.txt

Notable is an experimental build of Archi on Apple Silicon. This does, however, mean that this EA version is built on a development build of Eclipse 4.21. Sometimes a late breaking change in Eclipse development means that I can't use the latest build and might have to roll back to using Eclipse 4.18, and therefore no Mac Silicon support (this happened with Eclipse 4.20).

Fun fact - in order to watch for Eclipse regressions I have to test Archi with the daily Eclipse build against 3 versions of macOs on Intel and Silicon, 2 Linux VMs at 100% scaling and 200% monitor scaling, and Windows 10 at 100% and 200% monitor scaling, between now and the final release of Eclipse 4.21 in September. Every. Day.  ;)

And you can download Archi 4.9 EA 2 here:

https://www.archimatetool.com/beta/

Remember - don't test this on real models! Create some temporary models to use.

Regards,

Phil
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Phil Beauvoir

Quote from: Phil Beauvoir on August 17, 2021, 13:06:49 PM

Notable is an experimental build of Archi on Apple Silicon. This does, however, mean that this EA version is built on a development build of Eclipse 4.21. Sometimes a late breaking change in Eclipse development means that I can't use the latest build and might have to roll back to using Eclipse 4.18, and therefore no Mac Silicon support (this happened with Eclipse 4.20).


And... there is a showstopper Eclipse bug on Mac:

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=571401#c26

This means that Diagrams don't render properly on Mac. I will have to roll back to Eclipse 4.18 until this is fixed.
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Phil Beauvoir

#11
I've released a new version, EA3:

https://www.archimatetool.com/beta/

Sadly, I've had to roll back to using Eclipse 4.18 for this build due to the Eclipse Bug: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=571401#c26

This means there is no longer a Mac Silicon version.
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Phil Beauvoir

#12
I've released a new version, EA4:

https://www.archimatetool.com/beta/

I've re-instated the Mac Silicon build because the Eclipse issue has been resolved for now:

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=571401

Regards,

Phil
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Jean-Baptiste Sarrodie

Hi,

For those interrested in the new specialization mecanism in Archi 4.9: note that there is no support planned for it in coArchi (this will have to wait for coArchi 2 which will certainly take several months to be out). This doesn't mean you can't use both, but in case of conflicts there will be no mean to decide which "version" to keep, and thus this will most certainly block the merge process and thus the publication of changes on the remote server.

You've been warned ;-)

Regards,

JB
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Phil Beauvoir

And there's another show stopper bug in Eclipse:

https://github.com/archimatetool/archi/issues/760

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=575778

So we have to roll back to using Eclipse 4.18 and unfortunately this means no Mac Silicon version or other fixes.
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