Monday, July 28, 2008

Balsamiq Mockups: Taking the evilness out of prototypes

Everyone that has heard Odd Helge Gravalid's presentation "Gui prototyper Onde" (GUI Prototypes Are Evil) knows why prototypes are evil shit. The main point is that proptypes create expectations about the functionality in the GUI that may not be fully implemented or may not be present at all, but it seems like it is. So what's wrong about that? Well, as I recently experienced; A couple of weeks after you presented the prototype, when you actually have implemented the functionality, the customer's project manager says: "What have you guys really been doing lately? This is nothing more than you showed me two weeks ago". And then you are in trouble. So the moral is that you should never make a prototype that actually looks like it's really implemented. It will most certainly backfire! Last Friday I came across this great GUI mockup tool called Balsamiq Mockups. The tool makes it really easy to create mockups by using the more than 60 pre-built controls. The cool thing is that it looks like they're actually drawn by hand, "so that people don't get attached to “that pretty color gradient”". This can certainly help us out not going in that prototype trap and rather let us concentrate on the important aspect of prototyping: Discussing functionality! Check it out: You can even try it out here!

70-502: WPF Exam

It's been a long time since I've blogged. What have I been up to lately? For the most part I've been working and tried to enjoy the summer as much as possible. I've also managed to pass the 70-502 - Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 – Windows Presentation Foundation Application Development exam. For the last month and a half I've been working on a WPF project and I would recommend everyone that has done some work with WPF to give the exam a shot. It's actually quite easy.