

Ask HN: Is there room for a Balsamiq competitor targeting iphone mockups? - smtlaissezfaire

It seems like Balsamiq and mockingbird are pretty good for quickly prototyping ideas, but they aren't great at producing professional looking mockups, especially for the iphone / ipad.<p>Is there room in the market for a competitor in this space?
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chrisbennet
Keep in mind that Balsamiq prototypes look like rough sketches instead of
"professional looking mockups" _on purpose_.

When you show a customer a mockup that is "just a sketch" (or looks like one)
you can get their feedback on the layout and content.

When you give them a realistic looking mockup, the conversation can get bogged
down in minutea like in "Can you make the background less blue? Maybe like
Bob's shirt?" or "I don't like that font, can you...?" At which point you have
to explain that it's only a mockup, not the actual product and politely try to
steer them back to what you asked them in the first place.

Also, when they see a what looks like a finished product they think the work
is mostly done which sets unreasonable expectations.

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smtlaissezfaire
Yeah, that sounds like good advice, chris.

What if you could streamline the process and cover both the wireframing and
mockup phases? The tool I'm thinking about building is very similar to other
prototyping tools (like Balsamiq), but would basically take your wires and
"upgrade them" to a more pro-looking mockup (after all, it's just a matter of
switching out images).

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glimcat
They already have that covered.

[http://support.balsamiq.com/customer/portal/articles/135659#...](http://support.balsamiq.com/customer/portal/articles/135659#exporting)

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smtlaissezfaire
Which link specifically were you referring to?

I'm thinking that a bunch of the iphone mockups that I've seen end up with the
same shared components - toolbars, tab bars, status bars, etc. Those standard
components are really the same objects, just in a more hi fidelity fashion.

Also, AFAIK with those tools, once you export, there is no way to keep the
wires and mocks in sync, right?

I've experienced times in a consulting shop where both the mocks + wires are
being iterated on simultaenously (mostly because the product guy would use
omnigraffle where the designer would use photoshop) - leading to mocks + wires
that just didn't jive with each other. This created confusion among the dev,
design, and product teams about what _specifically_ we were building, leading
to increased time to market.

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ansy
Keynotopia is a pretty good mockup alternative for iPhone and iPad apps. It's
not an application per se, but it's a set of templates for Keynote (or
PowerPoint or Open Office). You export the result as a clickable PDF which
works in a variety of viewers like GoodReader.

<http://keynotopia.com/>

You can get pretty nice results that are somewhat interactive on the device
itself.

~~~
smtlaissezfaire
Hmm - yeah, that's a really interesting concept.

Seems like the market is really fragmented - everything from traditional
photo/vector graphics software (photoshop, illustrator), traditional
wireframing (omnigraffle, etc), online wireframing (balsamiq) and even
presentation software (keynote and powerpoint!)

Keynotopia seems like a smart move for those who tend to lean to the
presentation side of things - though I'd find it hard to believe that a
designer who likes (or is used to) working in illustrator or photoshop would
want to start using keynote!

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frafdez
There's always room for competition. You just need to find the right audience
and pricing structure. BTW there is an iPad based app for mockups that does
iPad/iPhone mockups - iMockups.

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properslang
If there's one successful company making something that nobody else makes yet
many people want, it seems like there has to be space. I'd go for it.

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Kevindish
Try, if you can do a better jon there defenitly is! :)

