Link images & UI specs

I have been trialling Wireframe Sketcher. I work for IBM and we have been using our product Rational Team Concert (eclipse based) for collaborative development and I really like how this could integrate with our workflow.

Questions 1. I have some global elements done in Fireworks and I would like to have that in the background of the Sketch. I have put the image in the project explorer then dragged the image to the screen. I then realized I had the wrong version of the image so I updated it in the folder replacing the file but how to I update the screen with the update image. I noticed their is a property on the image called linked and it was set to false. How do I change it to to true to auto update the image or is their an update image button. After playing for a while I used the black and white button and it finally updated the image.

Question 2. I would like to be able to create a UI Spec through annotations telling the programmer and client what each interaction does. Is their a way to add annotations to items and then export those annotations into excel or word to create a UI Spec document for client review and approval. I like the batch export of screens.

Hi Anthony,

I'll see is I can detect image changes to update the screen editor automatically. What you can do for now is close and reopen the editor to refresh the image.

There is no excel or word export, however you can create multi-page (and even interactive) PDFs. Create a storyboard, which is just a sequence of screens, and export that to PDF. Perhaps storyboards could be improved to include annotations. Try them and let me know what you think.

Thank you for your quick reply.

This is the kind of thing I have seen for UI specs in other products http://www.axure.com/tourSpecification.aspx

I see what you mean. Axure is an expensive tool and that's why they do that. I'd like to keep WireframeSketcher simple and lightweight. Perhaps you could take a different approach. For example you could use WikiText plugin to write your spec and use it with exported PNGs. WikiText then can be exported to an HTML document which then could be easily converted to PDF.

What do you think?

I don't think it has to be that complicated as to create a word document. I could just be an output of the existing "Custom Properties for Text" that we could output to a share friendly format (csv, xml, plain text) from a story.

Anthony, screen files are saved in an open XML format so you could write a small tool to extract the text from custom properties. Would something like this work for you?

I have another request that looks similar to yours. It asks for a possibility to add comments to screens in storyboards. Those comments then would be exported to PDF to get the result that looks similar to what you get with Axure. Similar but much simpler. It would be just a line of text on the top of the page followed by the screen. Does this sound like something you want?

Comments attached to story board screens is a must have feature IMO.

The Storyboard when exported to PDF should then act like a table of contents allowing you to click on the screen thumbnail and jump to that screen. Having text appear next to each of these thumbnails would make it alot more valuable.

Cheers, Mike G.

Hi Mike,

Yes, I plan to add comments to storyboard screens. However, I still haven't decided what's the best way to present them in PDF documents. So far I think to add them at the top or bottom of each page. Is this what you are expecting?

I am not so convinced about the table of contents. I am already generating one and you can see it in the sidebar of your PDF viewer. The PDF viewer can also show you screen thumbnails. Are you looking for more than that?