The Sweetness of Quince Pro

It’s hard to say goodbye to something free, but this farewell doesn’t have to be forever.

The latest release of Quince featured a free trial of the ‘pro’ features, but that trial expired today, March 1, 2010.  Whether you are looking for reasons to ante up for a paid subscription, or you are just need to be reminded of some of the compelling reasons to move your trial subscription into a paid account, allow me to offer the following items for your review:

• Flexible Collaboration: Quince is, at it’s heart, a fine-tuned collaboration tool. Quince libraries allow you to build design asset repositories and give you all the tools you need to share these resources with people in and out of your organization. Further, features like multiple design libraries, the corkboard, notes, callouts, drawing tools, and deep-linked URLs allow team members to communicate together on the same files with the same tools in the same place.
• Secure, Reliable & Accessible: Since Quince is strictly a web application your team members don’t need access to a VPN or any other means of accessing a private network. Designers, developers and business professionals alike may quickly view the contents of your Quince library without ever having to hassle the IT department. As a Silverlight application, collaborators are not required to install any executables on their machine and Quince works with Macs as well as PCs. Finally, Quince is hosted in the cloud using Amazon Web Services with regularly schedule backups.

I recently posted a video on to the UX section of the Community Site that features some of the latest collaborative features of Quince. If you have a mere 11 minutes, I suggest that you do take some time to watch the video, but just in case you need a quick fix, I have prepared the following summary for your review.

Note: The video and the following screenshots highlight the many free features of Quince. A paid Quince Pro accounts gets you all of what you see here along with private and secure areas of the application for collaboration of proprietary information.
 

Getting Started

Getting started with Quince is simple. You may use your existing Infragistics account to gain access to Quince. If don’t have an existing account, the sign in form features a link to the new member sign up form where may create your account.

Exploring Quince

Once you are in, all the catalog features are right at your fingertips. You can explore existing patterns through a number of different search options.

Corkboard

Want to think out loud? When you find inspiration you can upload screenshots to your corkboard. Once you have images there you can annotate and comment on each item.

Corkboard Items

If you decide you want input from a colleague, sharing a corkboard item is easy and and updates made to an item will automatically show up in your browser – no save button here!

Exporting to PDF

Once you’ve made all the notes necessary and want to share with others in a disconnected format, Quince will generate a PDF for you that itemizes comments and annotations made to each item.

Propose a Public Pattern

Perhaps your conversations over a pattern have grown to take on a life of their own and you see how other’s may benefit from its use. You can easily propose a public pattern to be included in the main Qunice repository.

 

Watch the Video