P I L A N G O

I’m very happy to have gotten in touch with Peldi who has done such a good job on his Mockups UI prototyping tool.  There are several versions of the tool, either downloadable and installable on your Desktop as an Adobe AIR application, or as a plugin in several wiki products such as Confluence, TWiki, and even JIRA and there are more to come !  I am running Ubuntu Intrepid on my laptop and unfortunately AIR on linux is still in alpha so there are a two minor features that do not work but there is a workaround.

Installation went fine although the AIR detection widget present on the download page incorrectly states that AIR is not installed, another linux quirk.  Peldi graciously offered me a license (Thank you Peldi !) for my work on Pilango Workplan’s UI and that is fantastic because I really needed to start thinking about it and Mockups is just perfect for that.  Here is an example of some early thoughts on an element of Pilango Workplan’s UI:

What’s great about Mockups is that you work with high-level elements to compose your UI without having to focus on the implementation details of a particular framework.  You also have great freedom to personalize the UI elements with your titles and data through a dead simple text editor interface (very wiki like !).

I did some UI prototyping work in GWT a couple of months ago for instance.  The result was not bad because it was an executable prototype which could be demoed, but the amount of work involved to end up with something that’s difficult to modify is not worth it when you have a tool like Mockups around.

I really like the comment feature because it allows you to put down some thoughts on your UI before actually attempting to prototype them.  Using a wiki for collaboration on Mockups must be fantastic and would make a great addition to an earlier product that is on hold for the moment, Pilango Design, where I wanted to work on collaborative design processes (Crowdsourcing Innovation !).  For the moment, I’m simply keeping my mockups under version control just like other important files.

So in conclusion, go check out Balsamiq Mockups for your UI prototyping needs.  I assure you, you won’t regret it !

P.S. By the way, Balsamiq Mockups is also a great deal…

Tags: Partners, Pilango Workplan by Luis Arias
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It’s been a while since the first posts in April and the Pilango story has had its ups and downs, working with bright people to nail down the product concept, talking to prospective partners and customers about what could work for them.  I have had the pleasure of benefiting from the mentoring from family, friends and business acquaintances, and now after several iterations, I am happy to say that Pilango Ltd is now officially a limited company incorporated in the UK.

This was all possible because of two great partners.

First, Companies Made Simple which I highly recommend for anyone looking to start a UK business.  Their online application is smart and simple and their process highly streamlined.  I spent some time looking for the right agent and I’m definitely glad my research finally brought me to Companies Made Simple.

Second, HSBC which is truly a global bank (well, maybe missing some coverage in America).  Thank you Rita for overseeing my application and Bertrand and Jacques at the branch office here in France for your help and support.

And finally thank you Emily for your help and support.

Now on to a first contract starting next week and more posts later to talk about Pilango Workplan, my current software development focus, and Balsamiq Mockups, a great new tool for UI design that people around the web have been discovering recently.  I will be using Mockups to design the  UI for Workplan.  More on that later because Mockups is such a neat tool it deserves a nice detailed post (at least one !) all by itself.

Tags: Pilango Story by Luis Arias
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