

Review of Balsamiq, Mockingbird and MockFlow - mdolon
http://devgrow.com/review-of-balsamiq-mockingbird-and-mockflow/

======
snprbob86
I must be getting old and curmudgeonly because yesterday I was arguing against
CRM in favor of spreadsheets and today I'm arguing against mockup tools in
favor of pen and paper...

Again: we tried several tools including Balsamiq, Mockingbird, Photoshop,
PowerPoint, Keynote, and others. Ultimately, what worked best was a
combination of a whiteboard and paper.

1) Gather a few team members in a meeting room

2) Give each person their own color marker

3) Go nuts on the whiteboard, draw whatever comes to mind.

4) Make lots of revisions. This is the best part: It's a whiteboard! Erase
with your finger. Get over it, get dirty, mix colors, make a mess. Who cares?

5) When you're ready, let your best "artist" redraw it on the whiteboard nice
and big so everyone can make even more revisions.

6) On paper or a laptop or whatever, take notes of any edge cases or things
you simply didn't think of earlier.

7) Repeat 3 to 6 until you're happy.

8) Transcribe to paper. This is vital! Do not just take a photo. You need to
have every single screen on it's own piece of paper, so you can thumb through
them later.

9) Write the name of the screen on the top edge of the back of the page. This
is so you can quickly skim through the stack backwards to find the page you
are looking for.

10) Write any notes about the behavior of the page on the front as callouts or
on the back as commentary.

11) Photocopy the whole stack and hand out to the team.

12) Encourage everyone else to write all over them in red pen

13) Bring the notes to the next meeting & start all over until it's close
enough to go to implementation.

Note: this advice is for NEW UIs. I still haven't quite figured out the best
way to handle changes to EXISTING UIs. There seems to be a mismatch in our
brains when you try to draw stuff on top of print outs of real screens. The
resulting markups look out of place next to polished features, so they don't
get the same thought process as a completely hand drawn mockup. I've got to do
more experimentation here...

~~~
pjscott
You could call that advice old and curmudgeonly, I suppose. You could also
call it lightweight and agile, and still be right. That's the power of
marketing!

(Seriously though, I think this is a good approach, and thank you for putting
it so clearly.)

~~~
snprbob86
Maybe I should write a book, title it "Lightweight Agile Engineering By A Not
So Old, But Still Quite Curmudgeonly, Hotshot Full-Stack Developer, Ninja
Rockstar"

In addition to the chapters "Spreadsheets Are Pretty Much Always Better Than
Writing Code" and "Love Thy Whiteboard", there could be chapters titled "How I
Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Command Line", "Visual Debuggers Are For
People Who Can't Read", "Big Oh-My-God It's Not That Hard", and "Seriously
Guys, Someone Already Did That Way Better".

------
sudonim
I'd speculate that if this review were done in 6 months, Balsamiq would be the
hands down winner given the writer's criteria.

The balsamiq team is working on a new project: myBalsamiq
<https://www.mybalsamiq.com/> . It looks like it will make both sharing and
collaboration dead easy. You can even get a sneak preview of how the Balsamiq
team are using it. <https://our.mybalsamiq.com/projects/>

~~~
mdolon
I'm the author of the post. I did actually come across their comparison table,
which states that a web app is in the works, just I totally forgot to mention
that in the post. I just played around with the project you linked to though
and I must say, it is pretty amazing. Depending on the pricing scheme they end
up with, I would definitely reconsider my choice.

~~~
balsamiq
email me at peldi@balsamiq.com, I'll see what I can do about getting you early
access to myBalsamiq... ;)

Re: pricing, here's what we're thinking: <http://www.balsamiq.com/buy?p=myb>

~~~
yarone
Hey! I want early access. I even asked for it months ago...

(eagerly waiting...)

------
ams6110
I've been really impressed with LucidChart recently. I'm on a trial account
and will probably sign up. It's not limited or specifically focused on
wireframing, it's something closer to a lightweight OmniGraffle or Visio.

------
mtw
you forgot iplotz! intuitive, lots of controls (+more), easy sharing (png or
html), collaborative features, desktop version, import images etc.

