CandyPick #6 Balsamiq Mockups, Beautiful Mockups – No Skill Required (free & paid)
Balsamiq Mockups lets you easily create ‘quick and dirty’ wireframe-style mockups for everything from web pages and desktop application user-interfaces to presentations, documents and print collateral. It’s a rare program that is so intuitive that new users are able to take advantage of nearly every feature on the first try. Balsamiq Mockups is such a program.
Gosh darn good mockups done easily
I am the most graphically useless person on earth and until I started writing this review, I had only used Balsamiq Mockups to create a few very basic web page wireframes. Surprisingly, after only a few minutes of experimentation, I was able to come up with the surprisingly professional-looking mockup below.
There’s a funny story behind this 2 minute mockup, but I’ll post it another time.
That’s the beauty of Balsamiq Mockups. You don’t have to be a skilled graphic artist, or even graphically skilled at all (as evidenced by yours truly), to use it effectively. Just choose the elements you want to include from the library of objects and shapes, drag them into place, manipulate them as you see fit, enter text and you can create highly-effective mockups in *minutes*.
Choose a “flavor”
Balsmiq Mockups is both a desktop application AND a similarly featured web app and a free version of each is available (there’s also a few other versions for specific purposes). It’s always interesting to see what features are stripped out in the free versions of apps that are offered in this way. In Balsamiq’s case, it looks like all functionality is in both free and paid versions – it’s the ability to save that isn’t. You can see a full comparison of the features available in each version near the bottom of this page on the Balsamiq Mockups site.
If you find yourself needing to get your mocking up on, on a regular basis, Balsamiq Mockups is one app you’ll definitely want in your toolkit. If you’re a software or web developer, you can buy a version that lets you save mockups as an attachment in Confluence, JIRA, XWiki, or FogBugz. Balsamiq Mockups doesn’t get in your way; it lets your way rule the day.
This is Dr. Apps checking out. In the meantime, you can follow me on Twitter.
App info Software: Balsamiq Mockups Version used: 1.8.8 (other versions may have different version numbers) Compatibilty: Windows XP/Vista/7 (Adobe AIR based app) and web browser Installer size: Various License: free & paid ($79) Language(s): English Homepage: http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups
This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
(Material Disclosure: None. Neither Dr.Apps nor OpenCandy has received compensation from the creator(s) of Balsamiq Mockups for the creation or posting of this content.)
1 Comment so farOne Response to “CandyPick #6 Balsamiq Mockups, Beautiful Mockups – No Skill Required (free & paid)”
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by Max / March 30, 2011
Another HTML interactive tool you might want to check out is Tiggr – http://gotiggr.com. With Tiggr you can create, share and preview Web and mobile HTML prototypes. The key is that you can create interactive HTML prototypes with navigation which you can view and test in any browser.