RefreshingApps.com

Mockups by Balsamiq is a great innovative application for all those who are involved in software, web or RIA design and development. Balsamiq is a new company headed by ex Adobe employee Giacomo Guilizzoni (people call him Peldi) so the expectations are high.

In it’s simplest form Mockups is a replacement for the application developers notebook, however that is where the similarity ends. Mockups has a rich UI library for the most common interface elements. These elements are intentionally hand drawn so that the result always looks fresh and rough, so that people don’t get too attached.

Mockups feels like you are drawing, but it’s digital, so you can tweak and rearrange controls easily, and the end result is much cleaner. Teams can come up with a design and iterate over it in real-time in the course of a meeting.

I really liked using Mockups and although I didn’t use it in anger on a real project it was fast and fun. The selection and transformation of items on the canvas works just like you would expect coming from any graphics app. You can multiple select and resize which is just so nice and like a usual desktop application.

Design eye

On first glance the application UI looks a bit strange and I’m not sure about the horizontal scrolling of the object panel, thoughts of scrolling left and right all the time didn’t sound great. This is where the quick add functionality works well, just by typing in the input box.

I would have liked the option to just have a white background instead of the picture of a notebook. I can see the visual cue to why it is there but the novelty soon wore off. Also in future versions having a palette arrangement like Photoshop or Illustrator could possibly work better for the more serious designer. Those opinions aside the Baslamiq Mockups is a solid AIR application and one that you just need to try. I can see this being actively developed in the future with input from the community.

Information This is a commercial product and some features are disabled with the trial version. Apologies for the oversight I should have made that clear in the review, sorry for any confusion. The latest prices and concessions can be seen over at Balsamiq Mockups site.