Busy week for me this week. Between meetings, coding and real bad case of migraine, I've hardly had time to catch up with blogs or investigate new things. However, I did find a bit of time to look at two new tools, one of them being Balsamiq (the other tool, another blog post). I'd heard about Balsamiq some time ago but never really got round to playing with it until this week. And all I can see is that it's damn awesome.
What is it? It's a tool to do mock-ups of UI's. What makes it awesome (apart from the really low price tag), is that it's extremely easy to use and powerful at the same time. Take a look at some screen mock-ups
And here's the iPhone version of the "application"
So in 5 minutes (literally), I threw up a few mock-ups of some UI that I can then show the customer. The cool thing is that it's so easy to use, you can actually have meetings with the customer using Balsamiq and come up with a design together. Here's an image of the the surface design with some random controls:
I remember when I was doing mock-ups years ago using RAD tools like Delphi / Visual Studio. Man does this save time.
Love it! Definitely it's on my must-have-tools list. If you do any type of UI mock-ups, I highly recommend it.