31–40 of 48 posts
I love Pencil for Firefox. It's seriously underrated: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pencil/
Not available for Firefox 6.0 I do believe Firefox's frenetic update schedule just bit me in the ass. EDIT There's a standalone version: http://pencil.evolus.vn/en-US/Downloads/Application.aspx EDIT2 This add-on ("temporary branch") works with Firefox 4-6: http://code.google.com/p/pencil-ff4/
as a product manager, I use 2 tools for wireframes and flow design Flairbuilder and OmniGraffle http://flairbuilder.com/ http://http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnigraffle/ The Flairbuilder developer is quite active and responsive about updates. I switched here from Balsamic because Flairbuilder allows for somewhat dynamic & functional mockups. http://twitter.com/#!/flairbuilder
Earlier quoted context omitted.
cool -- you actually create your entire wireframe in keynote?
Yes. I do everything in Keynote. Then I'll pick up the colors I need and start coding the CSS part. And when I need some photo editing, I use GIMP. Usually the mockups are better than the final product, because in Keynote 1. you can align everything so damn good 2. the font rendering looks awesome
Expression Sketchboard
Aside: Creature House Expression was a wonderful - yet industrial-strength - 'painterly' vector drawing package. Superb UI (which many users complained wasn't 'Adobe' enough), and a fun, quirky website. The combination of science and art made it one of the highlights of successful software development. You can guess what happened when Microsoft acquired the company... ;-)
Anyway, MS were kind enough to make the Windows and Mac Classic/OSX versions available for free - follow the wikipedia links.
Just remember, this is software that was a rival to Adobe Illustrator, and contained technology that some thought would threaten Flash. Steep learning curve (but excellent PDF manual included), and capable of far more than UI mockups. The old Topica mailing list is a mine of useful information, and Yahoo has a current (but less trafficked) list.