UI mocking

I’ve seen way too much time being lost in UI mockups. You do your careful mocking in HTML/Photoshop/Swing and then you send it across for review. Now they want it changed and again you spend some more time changing it.

I deal with swing based screens mostly and I have to draw it on paper or explain it to the graphic designer so that it can be drawn again in Photoshop. I’ve got to put this in a design document and send this in for review. I can even mock them up myself fairly easily in any GUI designer. There is even a look and feel called the Napkin Look and feel so that it gives the impression that your screen is a mockup and not functional. While I like the concept and the look and feel is way too cool (but a overkill), I’ve tried another experiment this time. I drew the screens on paper scanned them in and stuck them in the document (you can use a fax machine instead of the scanner too). It was well received and nobody objected, not to mention that the time was saved in not waiting for the designer person . I can update them much faster too and it really looks like a mockup when you draw them using pencils. Of course for a change I did write legibly

Cool dynamic images

Check this out

Get more cool ones at hetemeel.com

EclipseUML

Lately I’ve been looking at UML modelling tools. Tried quite a few of them (freeware, shareware etc.). Even downloaded the new freely available Java Studio Enterprise, but didn’t like the fact that I had to leave Eclipse . Now I don’t have to thanks to EclipseUML from Omondo.

This is what plugin architecture is all about !! I have used the Free Edition so far and it’s amazing. No major hiccups, would have liked to install through an update site, but their installer was OK too.I liked the fact that they have maintained the overall look and feel and icon set remains faithful to Eclipse. Auto-layout is not very smart though and the export is to SVG only (the commercial edition add more export formats). I like the fact that I can version-control this along with my source code so that I can keep them updated so that there is no “lag” between design and development. I am going to go all crazy with use cases and sequence diagrams too

If all goes well I want to suggest that we use this plugin in all our teams and maybe I can push for the commercial version too.

PS : I am using w.bloggar to write this post and the spell check suggests “unholy” as a correction for UML appropriate you say !!!

To WordPress with love

Well now that you can get a wordpress account without an invite I got one ! But I would like to move all my posts from blogger to here (not that there are lots ). I guess this should be a default feature for all services that are launched nowadays. I mean the whos-who of the blogosphere are already blogging and if you want them to switch to your service, then there should be a “import from service”. I read here that it was a planned feature, hopefully we will see it soon

w.bloggar with wordpress.com

I was using w.bloggar as the client to my blogger account. To continue using w.bloggar with my wordpress.com account, found the setup config here. Basically this is the config that is needed :

Host: yourname.wordpress.com
Page: /xmlrpc.php

Subscribe buttons on WordPress

I wanted to add the subscribe buttons for Google today and found the howto here. I created a new category for adding these buttons and followed the procedure. This did not work. It was showing the text and not the image. After some digging around I found that the “Show Image” needs to be enabled at the category level. So there you go, hope I saved someone else’s time