Now, I have very few tools to do my job, and some Ytria tools cover things I could only have dreamed of doing with some third-party products or the next Domino Designer release. In this article, I'll do a brief review of the Ytria tools for developers and let you know why I've found them so helpful.

Ytria has a tool, ActionBarEZ, that can help with action buttons in forms and views; SignEZ, that lets developers sign databases without knowing the signing ID's password; DesignPropEZ lets us easily change/view design properties for all design elements; and my personal favourite, ScanEZ, that let's you do almost anything with document content, as well as a complement of very nice and useful features. Let's see these tools in more details.

ActionBarEZ
This little guy, ActionBarEZ, basically lets you change the properties of all (or some) action buttons on forms and views, as well as the action bar properties. It supports both R5 and ND6 properties, as shown in Figure A.

FIGURE A


ActionBarEZ lets you change the properties of action buttons on forms and views. Roll over picture for a larger image.

With this tool, I find it a lot easier to incorporate forms and views from another application. Since I can change the colors and fonts of the action buttons and action bars, I can rapidly change the colors of the newly copied form to the look of the current application (nope, not all of our applications have the same color scheme!). I know that in my company, almost each application upgrade/major revision is accompanied by a change in the looks of the application. ActionBarEZ can be a big time saver here.

I have been in contact with Ytria and I had a peek at the upcoming ActionBarEZ release. This promises to be a major thing: ability to copy actions from and to views and or forms, share actions or unshare them, modify button image... This is very exciting and will definitely be a killer tool for designers.

DesignPropEZ
DesignPropEZ lets you manage all design properties that are accessible from the design views (forms, views, etc) like inherit from, prohibit design replace/refresh, hide for Web, hide for Notes clients. All elements can be changed and audited at the same time, no need to look at them one by one.

I initially thought this application was a bit useless in ND6 since you can set properties to multiple design elements at the same time, but the audit feature (which allows you to see each design element and its properties) is very nice, especially if your application has design elements that inherit from multiple templates.