Hi, I have now used Axure RP for some months now (I used to use Keynote) and before you read this post I want to assure the reader that I still think it is an awesome tool and essential for my work. However, there are a lot of things rotten in the state of Axure and these are the things that get on my nerves on a daily basis:
Interaction
1, What's up with the Windows 95 interaction style? Dialogs upon dialogs and then there are more dialogs. You would think that a product for people in the field wouldmake use of a more modern design pattern like the inspector pattern. This becomes blatantly obvious when you move from Keynote to Axure RP. Why are so many modal dialogues (case editor being the most obvious example)!
2. There's no drag 'n drop for lists, just a bunch of up and down buttons. Once again this make me feel all 1995 inside.
Weird stuff/annoyances
1, Double clicking on a big chunk of text doesn't take you to where you clicked butrather to the middle of the text field. How does that match anyone’s mental model?
2, Weird auto-scrolling in lists. Using the dynamic panels panel to edit stuff and then when closing the dialogue the list scroll to another position. Once again I fail to see how that matches anyone’s expectations?
3, Why doesn’t hidden stuff stay hidden? If I have master with a bunch of dynamic panels and I set them to hidden they show up in on the page where I use that master anyway, usually blocking important stuff. It's frustrating when making mockups of dynamic panels or popup menus.
Features
1, No compound-elements. I cannot say that all these elements belong to an other element without resorting to dynamic panels and adding state.
2, No assigning events to multiple elements. This gets especially tedious when you have a button with an image and a text. My solution is to add a transparent rectangle on top of it all and adding the case to it, but then you miss all the niceties such as roll-overs en onclick behaviour.
3, No ruler guides. This is a major omission. Since there is an automatic snap to grid it becomes a massive annoyance when you want to align with something that is off the grid.
4, Text layout is sorely lacking with line height being the most obvious omission.
5, No ability to mark something as "fixed" (like the CSS property).
6, Some frequently used event types are missing such as onscroll and onkeydown.
