[Melbourne-pm] Last night's talk on Balsamiq Mockups

[Rick Measham]

  G'day Folks,

Last night I quickly demonstrated Balsamiq Mockups.
(http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups)

The product is fantastic for that early-stage design of a product. When
creating a product with an interface, it can be really instructive to
work out the screens and how they interact. But doing that in HTML or
almost any other design system can get you too bogged down in the
details. Balsamiq is great in that you can't get deep. You can't
position things with pixel perfection and you can't give every option in
a drop-down select.

I'm personally using it for $work and it's really helping me to plan the
   development of new work as I'm starting with a really low-level
interface design.

As I said, you can try it on their website without installing it. You
can install it locally without buying it. But you'll need to buy it to
save and open files and to get rid of the annoy-prompt.

You can export-to-xml and import-from-xml via the clipboard without a
licence which means it isn't so crippled that the demo version is
useless for doing something 'real'. (What's more, the XML is nice and
clean so you could actually use that to do something interesting if you
so desired..)

Anyway, hopefully some of you will find it useful.

BTW: Credit where credit is due: I heard about it from Jeff Atwood and
Joel Spolsky's 'Stack Overflow Podcast' which, admittedly, is one of the
worst produced podcasts I've ever heard; though that is somewhat
mitigated by the occasional gems such as Balsamiq.

Cheers!
Rick Measham


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