April 7, 2010
73 Comments

Axure Better Defaults Library v2

This is version 2 of the Better Defaults library, expanded to sixty five (or so) interactive and cleanly styled widgets. Use it in place of the standard widget set.

Reasons to use these widgets include:

  • Consistent and improved styling.
  • Polished interactivity.
  • Standardized labeling.
  • Expanded set of shapes & controls.
  • Rollover, MouseDown, Selected, and Disabled styles for most controls.
  • Includes all defaults.

This is for version 5.5 and above. Put the extracted .rplib file in your “My Documents\My Axure RP Libraries\” folder (Windows) or your “Documents\Axure\Libraries” folder (Mac).

Preview |  Download the Axure Library

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  • chashui.cai

    Thanks for you works!!

  • http://www.shimuuu.com shimu

    This helps a lot! Thanks for sharing!

  • http://www.b2cbeta.com eli

    thank you guys~

  • http://www.yintop.com/yintop yintop

    I like it!

  • http://www.arscat.com muyumao

    Nice work!
    This version is awsome!

  • http://imwill.cn/ will

    Thank you for sharing, it will give me work bring great convenience!

  • Marcus Tucker

    Great stuff! :)

    HOWEVER, I’ve noticed a couple of things that I think need to be fixed:

    1) Though some are, the majority widgets are composed of elements which have NOT been grouped, so once added to a page they are not so easy to move around… examples are “Error Popout”, “Text Area – Rich Controls”, etc. Please ensure that *all* the widgets are composed of grouped components, thanks!

    2) “Loading Animated – Small” seems to contain TWO images offset oddly so presumably a mistake?

    That’s all so far…

  • Fjorton

    Saves countless hours, thanks.

  • TheRamblingOne

    Thanks Loren, I use your library all the time. Really excited to get into the update.

  • http://acleandesign.com Loren

    @Marcus Good catches, thanks for the feedback. All of those fixes should be in now. (although Text Area – Rich Controls was already grouped so I didn’t change that – let me know if it’s still happening?)

    @everyone Thanks for the support guys, it makes all the work worth it!

  • lee

    so great!
    thanks for your share

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  • http://booto.net Kimcool

    Nice.Thanks a lot!

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  • alangasi

    Thanks, thanks, thanks!

  • http://www.coroflot.com/accorsi luis

    Congrats and thanks for this really amazing set! I’m already using it on my new project.

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  • shintaro

    Thank you! This is really useful ^_^

  • http://www.lowelife.com/mumble Iain Lowe

    Nice work Loren. And the blog post about sharing libraries is a great one too.

  • http://uxconsultant.com Alexis Antonelli

    Awesome, thanks!!

  • Marcus Tucker

    @Loren – I’ve re-downloaded and re-loaded into Axure (unloading first) but find that the issues I first reported above with “Loading Animated – Small”, “Error Popout”, and other elements (I’ve noticed “Popout – Top” and ” – Left”, there may be more) remain ungrouped. “Text Area – Rich Controls” is now fine though. Perhaps you haven’t uploaded the fixed version of the library? (It seemed to have the same size & date as the original)

  • Marcus Tucker

    PS – I meant to add that it would be great if you could add a new annotation field called “HTML Element” and put “button”, “h1″, “h2″, “h3″, etc in it instead of relying on the naming of the element to convey this semantic information, as surely most users will need to change the names anyway so it would be better if this semantic information were captured separately.

  • Marcus Tucker

    PPS – are you aware that your commenting system doesn’t notify commenters (like myself) when subsequent comments have been left? I only found your response because I was using your library, got caught out by an ungrouped widget, and decided to come back to this page to see if you had updated… but surely we commenters should receive automatic notifications? (That’s usually the point of capturing our email address)

  • http://www.dimitrivisser.com Dimitri Visser

    Thanks! Downloading as we speak – add a paypal donation button dude

  • kaola

    thank your amazone library!

  • http://buddingba.wordpress.com/ Mark Tattersall

    Thanks. These are great, and just what I was looking for. Like the blog also.

  • ghettomaster

    Amazing, and I second the paypal donate! You are a legend!

  • http://acleandesign.com Loren

    @marcus Thanks for all the feedback. I think the issue with the old prototype is on your end – just reverified that it’s updated on the server, everything looks good to me.

    Updating the fields is a good idea for many projects, however I don’t think I want to mess with people’s specifications just yet (it’s a complex area).

    As for the commenting system – well it’s just WordPress’ default :) Definitely something for me to look into as I work on the site in the future.

    Finally, feel free to make these libraries your own. You can open it up edit away until it matches your style perfectly!

  • axurenoob

    I probably missing something easy here, but I only see 23 widgets in the panel when I view the Better Defaults Library. I don’t see “Popout – Top” and ” – Left” and “Loading Animated – Small”, “Error Popout” and other elements I see if I look at the .rplib file directly. Any thoughts?

  • http://acleandesign.com Loren

    @axurenoob Check out this article on the Axure site that shows how to load custom widget libraries: http://axure.com/custom-widget-libraries.aspx

    Keep in mind that you want to load it and then select it in the Widgets pane.

  • axurenoob

    @Loren Thanks. I added the file directly to Documents>Axure>Libraries. When I went to load it from the Widgets pane per the article you listed, I saw that there was a ‘Refresh Library’ command. That did the trick.

  • Amanda

    Every time I try to use the ‘editable text’ widget, I start to get error messages popping up non-stop. Is this happening to other people?

  • http://acleandesign.com Loren

    @Amanda Hmm.. I can’t seem to recreate the problem. Where do the errors appear? In Axure? In the generated prototypes? (and if so, what browser?)

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  • Larry

    Is there a way to make a text field appear disabled (that is, grayed out) on page load? I tried adding a case to OnPageLoad to Disable a text field that is associated with an unselected radio button. That prevents a user from entering data in the field, but it does not gray out the field — so the user is missing the visual cue that the field is not enabled.

  • http://acleandesign.com Loren

    If you right click on the textfield, there will be an option to set it as disabled (under Edit Widget).

  • Larry

    Thanks, Loren. Setting the field to disabled prevents a user from entering data, but does not determine the appearance of the disabled field. The appearance of the disabled field (grayed out vs not grayed out) ultimately depends on the browser. IE does not gray out a disabled field; Firefox does gray out a disabled field. Score one for open source!

  • Cheryl

    Thanks for your contribution!

    —Cheryl from China

  • http://marslau.com marslau

    Very cool,thx!

  • SHIYIWEILAN

    excellent work！thank you!

  • help!

    When I unpack the zip, it is full of folders about word document specifications and other junk folders with nonsense names. If I try and download through firefox instead, it crashes the browser. I’m not sure what is wrong, but I thought you might want to look into it!

  • http://acleandesign.com Loren

    @help Axure files sometimes confuse archive utilities, because they are basically zip files with a proprietary extension.

    What unzip program are you using? It is going a little too far and taking apart the .rplib file as well as the zipped folder that it is contained in. Trying another one may solve the problem. (This has been an ongoing issue.. thought I had solved it by zipping folders containing the axure files, rather than the files themselves).

  • help!

    Thank you so much for your quick response! That totally fixed it – I used stuffit expander instead of the default unzip program. You are so awesome for making these and helping out! :)

  • http://www.51sxue.com/ davidlau

    thank you ,It’s very good!

  • http://www.valeryxavierlentz.eu Valéry

    Nice library. I always used your better defaults 1, I will certainly switch to this one. Thank you for sharing.

  • http://twitter.com/joaodefreitas João de Freitas

    Congrats Loren! That´s a nice and usefull work.

    @joaodefreitas

  • Fabian

    Awesome.
    How can i make my own stencils? I got a lot of them as .omnigraffle .ai or .pdf. How to import these to Axure?

  • http://www.alitedesign.com/ Alite

    Very Cool!

  • http://acleandesign.com Loren

    Hey Fabian,

    Give this article a read: http://www.acleandesign.com/2010/04/creating-and-hosting-awesome-axure-libraries/
    Importing OG and AI files can be tricky, usually I use images for this.

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