Accidental Technologist

Musings about Entrepreneurship, Technology and Software Development

  • Home
  • About
  • Still River Software
  • Privacy Policy

Powered by Genesis

You are here: Home / Technology / I use Balsamiq Mockups and So Should You

I use Balsamiq Mockups and So Should You

October 12, 2009 by Rob Bazinet 10 Comments

Tweet

No, I am not a spokesperson for Balsamiq but rather a happy customer.  In the unfortunate event you have not heard of Balsamiq Mockups and you develop software or design it, you are missing out.  Balsamiq Mockups is a tool that allows developers to create mockups easily using a library of user interface components to help ease the pain of creating screens.

mockups_fpa

Replaces Pad and Pen

This is a great little tool which helps me develop screens and workflow for the software applications I create.  I use this tool instead of the usual pad and pen to determine how a particular screen will look.  A recent mockup of the administration screen for a Survey tool I?m creating:

SurveyMockup

What makes this so nice is it appears similar to writing on a pad of graph paper with one key exception; I can determine the dimensions of my screen and how much space each component laid out on the screen will take up.  This way, I *know* how everything will fit on screen or in the browser and won?t be surprised after the HTML/CSS is written.

SurveyMockup-Dim

I can toss aside my pen and paper and just use Mockups.  I spend my time now dragging and dropping controls from the library and know exactly how much space I am taking up, keeping in mind the screen sizes of the target.  I easily move controls around, remove them and customize their text.  I cannot say enough about how much time this saves me.  Instead of fretting over how bad I draw, I can not easily create what I need to get my work done.

Control Library

Balsamiq Mockups is not a free-hand drawing tool, I could not use such a tool.  Rather it contains a library of common user interface tools which you drag and drop to the grid surface.  They tout 75 ready-to-use controls:

balsamiq_controls

I have yet to need any control in my interfaces that is not in this library.  They even have layout components for iPhone applications.

Third-Party Integration and Support

When I decide to use a tool I often look to see if the tool with integrate with or support other tools I might be using.  This isn?t critical most of the time but can be the deciding factor in some situations.

Although there is built-in support to export a mockup to Adobe Flex, there is a company, Napkee, which allows the user to create full HTML/CSS/JS or Adobe Flex 3 from a mockup, saving a ton of time to give you a great starting point.

Not enough parts to play with?  Mockups To Go offers user-contributed UI components and Mock4U provides some hand UML components.  I think we can all stop using Visio and save ourselves some headaches.

I subscribe to the Balsamiq blog so I know what is coming next and when I will see it.  I could imagine feedback is welcome.

In the Air

Mockups is an Adobe Air application so the installation is easy.  I know what you are thinking, I don?t want another run-time on my system.  Stop your whining, you have a ton on there now and it won?t kill you to have another.  The number of good Adobe Air applications I use is growing and are really good, TweetDeck for example. 

One really nice thing about Adobe Air apps is they run on all the platforms I need; Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Mac OS X.  I understand they also work on Linux.

The Adobe Air runtime is super-simple, just like installing Adobe Acrobat Reader and once the runtime is installed, each application is just a simple click.

Finally

Mockups is not free to be able to save mockups but you can try it out or if you don?t care about saving, they just install and use it.   The licensed version does cost $79, so a bit pricey in my opinion, but a valuable tool all the same.

Balsamiq does release updates often and you need to visit the site to check for updates and install them.  I really wish this was built into the app like so many others where it either does an automatic check or allows me to check for the update.

I also wish for a way to export as a PDF to share with others who don?t have the tool.  I would like to be able to annotate diagrams and collaborate with others, maybe myself and a designer.

I can?t say enough good things about this little tool, it makes my job easier everyday.

Technorati Tags: Adobe Air,Balsamiq Mockups

Share this:

  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Email
  • More
  • Pinterest
  • Tumblr
  • Pocket
  • Reddit

Related

Filed Under: Technology

Care about your privacy? I do and use Fathom Analytics on this site.

Fathom Analytics

Recent Posts

  • Social Media Times Are Changing
  • It has certainly been a long time…
  • How to Fix Rails Flash Rendering When Using Hotwire
  • Hotwire Fix for CORS Error when using Omniauth
  • Fix Installation of Ruby using rbenv on macOS Big Sur

Categories

Services I Love

HatchBox - Easy Rails Deploys Fathom Analytics
Follow @rbazinet

Rob Bazinet
@rbazinet

  • Everything I read these days mentions ChatGPT or AI as the answer to everything. So many red flags. I hate trends l… https://t.co/ITLxsfAvd9
    about 1 week ago
  • If anyone knows any projects looking for some dev help, mainly Rails, as a lead who can manage small teams…I’d love… https://t.co/u0ClZ8x5wB
    about 3 weeks ago
  • This is such the truth…Even Amazon can't make sense of serverless or microservices https://t.co/0zK9YVMdrj
    about 4 weeks ago
  • I’m not sure I’d subscribe to content on Twitter when I already follow someone. Maybe I’m missing something.
    about 4 weeks ago
  • This looks really cool and a great real world use of AI. https://t.co/DzX5BbgDdY
    about 1 month ago
  • RSS - Posts
  • RSS - Comments
Find me on Mastodon