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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