Re: Balsamiq Mockups 3 With Key Download
Kenneth Calimlim
I have a user who had a large Balsamiq Mockup project embedded on a Jira issue. We have both the balsamiq for jira and balsamiq for confluence products. He deleted the .pmpr attachment on the jira issue thinking it was junk and now discovered that his balsamiq mockups project is deleted. If it was in confluence I could probably retrieve it from the space's trash can but I know of no means to get this back from a jira ticket.
I allow deleting an attachment that you own. If I take this away, no one can delete anything. I will educate folks not to do this. I think Balsamiq should simply not allow this or somehow hide the bpmr file from the list.
It seems users don't realize that the bmpr file represents the balsamiq mockup project. While there is a 'delete project' function in the balsamiq region of the jira issue, the file itself under the attachments section could look like garbage to someone trying to tidy up a jira issue. Nonetheless, this is a training thing. I'll explain to our supers and leads to educate their folks.
An option could be revoking 'delete attachment' permissions in my schemes but that would not make most people happy since they'd need to escalate to someone (probably a small handful of people) to remove things when requested. But, yes, this would preserve mishandling of this very important file. Thx all.
The main advantage of pairing a pattern library with Balsamiq is that it can free you from worrying about look, feel, and behavior when designing yet provide pixel-perfect renditions of the final product components.
If someone would have made a balsamiq, that would produce a bootstrap code by single click or bootstrap wysiwig tool, that would have balsamiq sketchy style and easy-to-use, he would immediately got me. Now this is the reason, why i am often NOT using balsamiq, because i do not want to spend two times the work.
My team occasionally uses Balsamiq Mockups to create mockups for our business users when working on basic UI requirements for new applications. We normally use the built in Balsamiq symbols and if needed simulate the Appian UI using screen shots of the Tempo interface (menu bar, filters in records, reports, etc.). Unfortunately, since Appian's UI elements and headers are styled differently from normal HTML there are differences between our mockups and what it looks like with the other UI elements.
I don't have an answer for your Balsamiq question, but why not just mockup your interfaces in Appian's interface designer? Dragging and dropping the UI components is pretty much the same as any mockup tool, with the added bonus of the mockup looking exactly like the final product.
When we first bought Balsamiq we were creating Portal apps on the old Appian 6.61, and then eventually moved to 7.6, 7.11 and now 17.1 (and slowly rewriting our Portal apps to SAIL/Tempo). The ability to drag & drop and build interface demos was rather limited in the past and also only available to those with Appian experience. Balsamiq gives us a way to have non-Appian developers able to make a mockup, and by abstracting the UI from the real Tempo look it minimizes the 'detail' talks that users have. Once they think you have an Appian form/search built they think that is all that is necessary, but they also get stuck in the details of color, layout, what the text field's label/drop down shows, etc.
Balsamiq and similar mockup tools are quick and easy for non developers to grasp without the users (and their management) focusing on details versus the big picture flow. i.e. when the mockup looks like the real thing it can actually make the high level discussions difficult.
Another solution, which I personally use is Inkscape, an open source SVG Editor. It is NOT a mock up designer, but we can use it for designing mock ups, using freely available stencil kit, like Yahoo Stencil Kit.
Take a look at Maqetta. It runs as a html5 app in your browser, so you can deploy it on your server to easily share your work with others, or you can simply start it locally and point your browser to localhost on port 50000.
WireframeSketcher is not open-source but it's free for open-source developers. WireframeSketcher helps you quickly create wireframes, mockups and prototypes for desktop, web and mobile applications. It comes both as a standalone version and as a plug-in for Eclipse IDEs. It has some distinctive features like storyboards, components, linking and vector PDF export. Among supported IDEs are are Aptana, Flash Builder, Zend Studio and Rational Application Developer.
Mockups are very useful in the early phases of software development. They can be utilised for capturing requirements as well as getting feedback from the user. Usually the focus lieson the structure of a UI and interactions between different elements of a UI.Mockup tools help to create mockups with different levels of detail, from a rough sketch to very detailed requirements. Balsamiq Wireframes is a mockup tool that allows you to quicklysketch UIs. It is essentially a collection of the most commonly used widgets for a variety of UI types. The user can arrange these widgets in a drag-and-drop editor which is oftenmuch faster than drawing a mockup by hand.
Balsamiq mockups always have an unfinished look and feel to them. This is actually intended for several reasons. It encourages the user to give honest feedback as they might not feelthat a lot of work has to be redone to include the suggested changes. Even more important, the mockup is not mistaken for the finished product. None will assume that it is ascreenshot of the final version and most of the code behind it already written.
Projects can be downloaded as a BMPR file. Regularly backing up projects by downloading its BMPR file from the projects homepage is recommended. It is also possible to upload existing BMPR files.Wireframes in a project can be exported to a variety of formats, for instance PDF or PNG.
@Scotty I can understand that. I would suggest creating a package with the name balsamiqmockups2 and keep the newest version with this package. I can certainly do that. Just making sure I understood you correctly.
I like micro-blogging, or well, I hang out onidenti.ca anyway. I'd like to use it more but Ihave trouble keeping track when I add interesting-but-too-prolificpeople on my subscription list, or I sink when the occasionalflamewar/"debate" erupts in a group I follow. I don't write a lot but Iread, and I wanted the reading to be more efficient. The way I readidenti.ca at the moment is:
Hm... You'd think there's a nice software announcement coming after thisbut there isn't really. This was the problem I set out to fix a fewmonths ago and here I want to show how I used the wonderful BalsamiqMockups software to wireframemy interface before jumping into the code (there is code though. You mayskip to the end if that's the only thing you care about.)
I've been using this for 18 months or so, and I really like it. Itenables me to make on screen, in a nice readable way, something I usedto scribble on paper before. The end result is something nice to look atthat I can work from, and if this is software built for someone else Ican show them (without any recoil of horror!) and make sure this is whatthey have in mind and that I'm not forgetting something glaringlyobvious.
The first time you use Balsamiq -- after the first 5 minutes where youwill be amazed and clicking eveywhere (try it, they have a web demo ontheir site!) -- it will take a bit of time to learn where to find what,and what widgets exist. Soon enough though, you'll be making these nicewireframes about as fast as the crappy hand drawings.
Here I use fancy arrows, and a post-it note. There are other elementslike the curly braces from before or the round yellow numbers, to helpcall attention to differents part of the design. With the differentcontainers and widgets you can easily mock up desktop, web and mobileapps. The font and general feel of the different elements is this way --a bit unequal, not perfect -- to remind of hand drawing and avoid givinga slick, "finished" impression. It's still easy to make radical changesat this stage of the development, so that's the kind of discussions itshould encourage (also, as opposed to say a realistic HTML mock-up, thecustomer/user is less likely to ask if it'll be done by next week sinceit looks nearly ready already!)
The wireframe was a very helpful guideline in remembering my goals andthe big picture, to avoid getting lost in the details over and overagain, though of course one should feel free to veer away when needed.On a touchscreen, a button with some text is a lot easier to click thanjust a small icon for instance. Also, the moving red line turned out tobe a pain in the butt to figure out in pygtk so messages are simplygreyed out and it's just as readable.
By the way, did anyone notice the glaring feature omission in themockups? If not, maybe you're more of a spectator, like me...! I foundout when attending an interesting talk wanting to share some good tidbitand... oops. There's no way to post a brand new message :) Ah well.
The app ended up being named pinch due to... a thesaurus really, nevermind. At the moment it's really read-only: you get your messages, youmark them as read or highlight the stuff you want to deal with later.You can remove messages you've read. No replying or writing anythingthough. I still consider it technically usable by other people as myname isn't hard-coded anymore, thus it's possible to set up the app foryourself ;)
The main reason development stalled is that using the app is dead slowand I'm not sure of the best way to deal with it, and I haven't made thetime to research how to handle this on a phone. There's a lot of waitingaround looking at nothing while the app needs to grab URLs fromidenti.ca and parse the XML. There are still a lot of interestingproblems to solve (and I still need a nice reader-optimisedmicro-blogging tool dammit), so I should get back to it eventually.
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