.NET Musings

For working up wireframes and application screens, there aren’t many tools better than MockupScreens.  The problems with using other tools like Visio (or even Visual Studio) is that it takes too much time.  When I’m sitting with a customer, I want to be able to crank out screens in a very fluid and frictionless manner.

I also don’t want the customer to think that it’s too costly to make a change. Often, when presented with something that “looks” real, they will either a) want to know when they can install it, or b) be afraid to suggest a change because of the perception that it’s too costly to change it now that “all of that code has been written.”

Here is the official word from the creators of MockupScreens:

Preview Of MockupScreens 4

In short, new release does much better job than the old one. For one it's much more robust, being completely redesigned and rewritten during past 14 months (wow, it went by so fast!). Other major improvements are the very same you kept requesting:

• Both much nicer and more "standard" interface - single main screen, native windows controls and dialogs, etc
• Ability to switch look and feel at any time among Black and white, Windows and Web look and feel
• Finer control of the mocked screens' element formatting: font color, font size, bold, italic, underline, etc

Not to keep you waiting any longer, here is the screenshot so you can see by yourself what I'm talking about. You have to click on it to really see the details.

(If you can't see the image, your e-mail program is blocking it. Open it here)
And below is the same mockup displayed in two skins: "Windows" and "Black and white". Again, click on it to see the details.

(If you can't see the image, your e-mail program is blocking it. Open it here)
Among great many other improvements, below are those that had also been much requested by you:

• Jump to another screen from any element while in slideshow mode or in exported HTML, and not just from "mark" icons
• Comments for any element (instead of having to put "mark" icons to comment something), along with comments being more prominent as important part of the Mockup Screens functionality, and with many small improvements in comments' exporting, printing, word-wrapping, the way how comments are displayed on screen, etc
• Improved "table editor" so you can draw and populate your tables more easily, and even paste the actual data from Excel
• Printing from MockupScreens directly, instead of exporting project to HTML so it could be printed
• Copying screen snapshots directly to Word (or other programs), with no need to export snapshots to image files first
• Importing and exporting whole scenarios or just copy-pasting them between different projects
• Better performance, especially with large files with many screens crowded with elements
• Export to XML so the mockups can be transformed by xsl-transformations to actual programming code
• Most elements can be shown as "disabled", to indicate that they are read only for example
• Simple file locking mechanism, for people that use MockupScreens in teams often working on the same file
• Ability to resize working panes to accommodate people with different  display size and resolution