Just a quick post to keep this thing up to date (and attract blog spam, I love it). We had an excellent speaker tonight at our user group in Hereford; Paul Foster from Microsoft presented on a ton of stuff in Windows Mobile and how to develop for it. He made it look easy but the designer tools scared me somewhat with their black turtle neck style UI and 'layers'. 'tis worth getting a look at Win Mo 7 before things pick up as devices are due to launch in the late Autumn and getting code working now on the emulator will place you in a good position for launch.

I recommend checking Paul's blog, the Windows Phone dev site and the XNA site to get up to speed on Win Phone.

Also, we had a good swag giveaway with decent T-Shirts, loads of MS Visual 2010 stuff (silly putty, screwdrivers, mice of the non-rodent variety) and a Windows 7 licence that MS gave us months ago and I found in the bottom of the swag cupboard. Everyone got something (I nabbed some silly putty). Thanks again Paul, I recommend you to get him at your user group (what, you don't have one!).

Balsamiq is the modern equivalent of fag packet scribbling (for non Brits, fag is a cigarette, not a slur!), somewhere you can quickly draw your software user interfaces without worrying about how they look. The best designs come from the back of fag packets apparently (perhaps they should have called it fag packet mockups).

If I had this at the height of the dot com boom I’d definitely have been saner and possibly would have made some cash. I ran a software development, web design and nerd creche at the time and we used to design the visuals in full for any sales leads we were going to see. It worked well apart from a few flaws;

1. It would take days to get the designers to come up with good looking visuals.
2. The customer would become fixated on the design (which was the point really, but it got too nitpicky). They would start asking to move this text over there and change the colour of that and could they have their logo animated in 3D. At this point we were still trying to get our foot in the door.
3. If they saw a nice looking visual they would often wonder why we wanted to charge them £40,000+ for the system. After all, it looked finished.
4. The nice imagery was just to get their attention, it had not been thought through by anyone so buttons would exist that did not make sense and the whole workflow thing had not happened yet.

As you can see, mockups looks a bit sketchy and this is intentional, I’ll explain why in a minute.

Along the top you can see the different groupings of UI controls. Selecting one of these will show the toolboxes with the UI elements in them, think of them like Visual Studio toolboxes with the controls in groups.

Hopefully you won’t end up with a design like below (from thedailywtf).

Mockups is not just a designer tool, in fact it is more targeted at developers who can’t do design (I include myself in that) as it takes away any fiddly decisions. For example, you can’t change the typeface from Comic Sans on anything, there is a good reason for this though. It appears that Comic Sans is the only typeface that is properly cross platform. Saying that, they do provide a way of changing the single font in use if it really irks you. By the way, because it is written in Flash and deployed using Adobe AIR it is cross platform and runs on anything that runs Flash (Windows, Mac and Linux, possibly ‘phones).

The documents are saved as XML which means you can write your own code to manage them (possibly translating to Winforms etc). There really is not that much to it, you drag and drop and set a few properties just like the VS designer.

The app is not free though and costs $79 (Monopoly money), real money is £52 which is a pittance really, you can find it at Balsamiq Studios.