The road ahead

Dec 06 2008 by Peter Severin

I was asked repeatedly to publish the roadmap for WireframeSketcher. I’ve hesitated until now as I am still looking for more feedback before committing to anything for the next major version. Currently my roadmap looks like this:

Screen editor features

• More widgets for both rich client and web UI prototyping:
  • Progress bars
  • Tooltips
  • Breadcrumbs
  • Expandable sections
  • Charts and other common UI elements
  • Anything that looks useful in this Interaction Design Pattern Library
• Annotation widgets
  • Post-it Notes
  • Callouts
  • Curly braces
• More flexible widgets
  • Colors, background, foreground
  • Font properties where it makes sense
  • Enabled/Disabled and other widget states
  • More configuration options for list/table widgets (grid lines visibility, item height, optional header)
  • Text-driven icons support in menu/popup/list/table widgets (think of a checkbox in a table cell)
• Better editor UI
  • Show coordinates/sizes on widget move/resize
  • Widget grouping
  • Widget locking
  • Master pages/layers
  • Better UI for widget properties (replace Properties View with something that requires less mouse clicks)
  • Quick widget insert. Hit Ctrl-Space; type some keywords to find a widget; hit Enter to insert the widget at current mouse position.
  • Display vertical/horizontal guides for standard paper formats (A3, A4, US Letter, Portrait, Landscape) so that screen mockups can be properly layed out for printing.
  • Configurable units (px, cm, inches)

Other long term features

• Storyboards
• Interactivity. Clicking buttons, links and hot areas to navigate between screens
• Presentation tools (think of a full-screen slideshow)
• Clickable HTML/PDF export for storyboards

Hopefully this gives you a better image of the direction I’ve planned for this product so far. Contact me directly or post a message on the forum with any suggestion you might have.

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