More features ;-)

Hi Peter,

congratulations for this impressive plug-in. I just gave it a trial and really liked the approach. Here are some comments:

We are currently using axure in our organization, so this is kind of a benchmark for our expectations. Although you would certaily need some time to match all the features of axure (or comparable products), there are two things, which are probably not that hard to implement.

1) Interactive links: connecting either screens or individual components. This one in my oppinion is abolutely essential for any wireframing tool.

2) HTML export: This one might be faily easy, sice you already have an XML export, so html might just be an ant job and some xslt. With a clean and well documented html (something axure is lacking), it would also be easy to do some "post production" with the wireframes e.g. adding css and/or JS.

Hi Steffen,

Thank you for the kind words! WireframeSketcher is still a young product and it's updated on the constant basis. Hopefully it will much your expectations in the some near feature.

I already have the linking feature on my list. I'm still brainstorming the details but it's certainly something I'm planning to add.

Could you describe in more details what an HTML export should produce? Do you expect all the widgets to be replaced by their HTML equivalent?

I see the HTML export as a particular case of a more general "code generation" support. It's something that I'm hesitant to add because sometimes things just don't map that clearly to code/HTML. After all what WireframeSketcher does is half modeling and half drawing. It's the drawing part that doesn't transpose very well.

Hi Peter,

I have to admit, that I do not have a clear idea of the html export, yet. Personally I only work on website design (as opposed to stand alone applications), and that makes html export kind of a natural first guess ;-)

However, I would not expect to get production code but rather a html mockup that I could easily show to other people outside the eclipse IDE.

Since I really like the sketch-like style of the wireframe, I would not replace the elements by the "real" html equivalents, but rather by simple divs, possibly with the widgets graphics as a background image. That's why I thought mapping should be quite easy (but to be honest, I did not went through all the widgets). So in the first step it would be really nothing more than "drawing" with html, but still it would help to mock-up some nice screens very easily and show them in the browser.

Steffen,

How about exporting an image per mockup and including it in an HTML page? Would this simplistic approach work in your case?

IMHO, a simple batch export-as-picture would be extremely helpful: I find myself re-exorting all my screens one by one several times a day to share the evolution with my client.

A straight "Save All as Images", "Export All Images to HTML pages" or "Export All Images to PowerPoint slides" (even better) would be a clear time-saver.

Love the plug-in, by the way - keep up the great work!

Looks like you need a batch export feature. This is something I was planning to do at some point.

I am thinking of implementing this feature as an Eclipse project exporter. It's a standard Eclipse approach and you can access different exporters via File->Export... wizard. The exporter would take an entire project and export all the screen (and perhaps storyboards) that are in there into the specified directory. Support for different formats (HTML or PDF) would be probably implemented as different exporters. Here's a mockup:

How does this sound to you?

Peter, that sounds great. I'd like to suggest a third option to export the project as a deck of images.

Yes, this simple approach would be a great. Still, when you want to include the links (the other request ;-) its not just one image and an html wrapper. At least you have to provide an imagemap to preserve the active areas. Or you export an image of each of the individual widgets and wrap it in a div-tag with the positioning information. Then it might make sense to export the image without text and have this also in the div. But in this case, do we need specific images anyway, or is it just the generic image of the widget?

At this point you might want to decide if you want to provide the html-export functionality as a feature of the software at all, or if you copy the generic widget images to a specific folder and wait for some smart guy to write the xslt file, that translates the widget nodes to the div nodes and an Ant job that starts the translation and copy all the necessary files. Unfortunately I don't know any smart guy, who is an xslt expert and is waiting for interessting projects... ;-)

Hi Peter,

You have a great software! Particular for web developers it's very useful because a sketch in web environment is hard.

I have two requests.

1.) The "Table" widget should be have a multi selection capability.

2.) A new widget "Toolbar" is very desired. You already have "Link bar", but why not Toolbar"?

Best regards. Oleg.

Hi Peter,

This definitely has my interest too! Perhaps for inspiration: Pidoco offers a "download" option that creates a zip file that contains a bunch of html+images, with clickable elements, and even working text fields. Everything is basically positioned by absolute pixel positioning of DIVs.

I can mail you a sample zip file if you like.

Hi Peter,

Export to PDF would be great. The mockup is dead on. I'm actually scouring the forums for hints on how to'print' a set of wireframes. I'm struggling with getting them to fit on the paper properly.

Having them in a PDF kills two birds with one stone (print ready and being able to easily email them).

Brian,

Thanks for bumping this up. The export feature is still in planning stages. What you can do right now is to use the command line to export images for all your mockups at once. You can find more information under the command line section of the user guide.

You can also try printing individual mockups in PDF. There is native support for this under Mac OS X and Linux. Under Windows you can install the PDF Creator.

I'll increase the priority of this feature. It would be helpful if you could describe in little more detail how you expect the exported PDF to look like.

I am thinking that a simple "export all mockups to PDF/Html" thing just doesn't cut it. I am pretty sure that users will want more control. For example what about the order of exported mockups? I am thinking about some kind of persistent "export profiles" feature. A profile would store the information about what should be exported, in which order, and perhaps some other options depending on the format.

Let me know what you think.

Hi Peter,

For the export. It would be nice if it would prompt me for the possible .screen files.

I'd like the resulting printout oriented in either landscape or portrait -- with option to scale to the size of the page or left alone. An option for a header/footer (for copyright, etc.) would be nice.

Once the pdfs are chosen, a dialog to order the list (via drag/drop) would help.

I haven't thought about persisting these options -- perhaps they could be persisted with the story? And perhaps the Story can define the selections and order?

Brian

Brian,

I was also thinking that using stories for multi-page export can be a good solution. I'll start small and add simple PDF export to both screen and story files. It would work much like the image export. Then we'll improve things from there by adding batch export and improving the layout of exported PDFs. Expect the first version of PDF export in the next release.

Sweet! I look forward to it.

Hi all! I've just released a new version with PDF export for both screens and storyboards. There are also batch export wizards that let you export multiple files to PNG and PDF. More here:

http://wireframesketcher.com/blog/2009-11-16-export-to-pdf-batch-exports-and-more.html

I'd like to have your feedack on these features!

Hi, i am create new wave for discussion new features, I hope the interaction will be interesting and productive. If no access on wave, write me, I was left with little invitations.

Hello Peter,

Would just like to say that I found your product much more polished and intuitive than your competitors and I hope to acquire licenses for the rest of my team once I sell them on WireframeSketcher.

I agree that some sort of linking mechanism would be a major boon, and I have some other suggestions. Here are my proposed requirements in descending order of importance to me:

• For some widgets such as menus and trees, I'd like to maintain the "meta-configuration" in one-place (i.e. tree node hierarchy, list items, menu items), but re-use these components in multiple places each with different states (i.e. selection, focus, disable state, item disable state, tree node expansion etc.). I should also be able to change the state properties of the master widget even if the master widget is embedded within a master screen within another screen.
• I find I am creating opaque panels to conceal elements in an underlying master screen a lot in order to modify the appearance. It would be nice to select portions of a master screen and hide them.
• Disable state for menu items, list view items, tree-view items, etc.
• A "spinner" or "loading" icon
• Arrows and elipses for annotation

Look forward to seeing what you come-up with.

-Jonathan

P.S. I find the semi-transparency, and embedded icons features to be extremely useful.

Hi Jonathan,

Thank you for your feedback! I am looking forward to having your team among my customers!

I agree that some sort of linking mechanism would be a major boon

The linking mechanism is still in planning stages. I will try to write a dedicated blog post with my plans for it.

• For some widgets such as menus and trees, I'd like to maintain the "meta-configuration" in one-place (i.e. tree node hierarchy, list items, menu items), but re-use these components in multiple places each with different states (i.e. selection, focus, disable state, item disable state, tree node expansion etc.). I should also be able to change the state properties of the master widget even if the master widget is embedded within a master screen within another screen.
• I find I am creating opaque panels to conceal elements in an underlying master screen a lot in order to modify the appearance. It would be nice to select portions of a master screen and hide them.

I've had a few requests along these lines. It's true that it looks like something very useful but it's also something that is very hard to get right. For now the only solution is to resort to copy&paste.

• Disable state for menu items, list view items, tree-view items, etc.

The most flexible way to handle this is to extend the wiki syntax. I am thinking the following could work: ~disabled text~. What do you think? If it looks acceptable to you then it could be part of the next version.

• A "spinner" or "loading" icon

I'll add this in the next version that is planned for next week.

• Arrows and elipses for annotation

Both of these items are on my todo list. For now you can use the Callout widget as an ellipse.

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to let you know that I've just introduced linking to support interactive prototypes. You can test prototypes in full-screen mode and export them to clickable PDF. The full blog post is here:

http://wireframesketcher.com/blog/2010-09-27-linking-and-interactive-prototypes.html

Please let me know how it works for you!