If you are interested in a great tool to do collaborative user interface design then run off to Peldi’s Balsamiq Studios website and follow the instructions to download a great new product that I am proud to have contributed to : Balsamiq Mockups for XWiki.

If you want to learn a little more about the product, Peldi wrote a fantastic product announcement on the Balsamiq Studios blog.  Thank you for the kind words Peldi !  It has been a real pleasure working with such an enthusiastic professional and I am looking forward to our future work together.  You are doing a great job on the Mockups product and as I can read your blog, there are a bunch of us that think so !  That’s what I call a milestone ! May the release of  Balsamiq Mockups for XWiki bring in many more that realize the power and flexibility of combining these two great tools.

If you have not yet experienced XWiki, then you can definitely learn more about this advanced open source wiki by going to the XWiki.org website and trying it out for yourself.  XWiki actually has a diverse product line of enterprise collaboration tools built on top of the XWiki Platform such as award winning XWiki Watch, a collaborative feed reader, or the dead simple wiki experience, XWiki Workspaces.  It will be really neat to see how Mockups will filter up into these more focused products, its a topic I’m very interested in exploring and pursuing !

I’m on assignment this week at Axians, a subsidiary of the large French conglomerate Vinci, that is specialized in providing custom audiovisual installations to corporate and institutional accounts.  The objective of my work is to secure a code base that is critical to continued operations at a high-level institutionnal account.  I have introduced Bazaar and getting the code base under change control.  I have also introduced Doxygen as a source code documentation tool (it is a C++/C codebase).  Things are working out well and my contact appreciates the possibilities of these tools.  More as the assignment moves forward on this post…

Any other good tools, methodologies or suggestions for documenting a critical codebase ?

Update : Nothing special to report !  The assignment went well and will finish off tomorrow with a big deck of slides that explain tool setup, tool usage, application architecture, application run-time configuration, and some ideas for starting a future software development project in a controlled environment with unit testing, continuous integration, etc…

One of the time consuming aspects of the assignment was simply setting up the toolset (Bazaar and Doxygen) in a Windows XP development environment.  There are a lot of pieces here and there that are useful to someone that can benefit from tools like TortoiseBzr and simply getting them together and documenting there installation idyosyncranies is some work.  It would be great if a comprehensive Windows installer for these tools existed, then again my customer got very interested in Ubuntu watching me work over my shoulder, so maybe they will start to leave Windows behind little by little !