Mockingbird Wireframes for IBM Lotus Notes Domino Web and Client Application Development

01/13/2010 11:06 AM by Chris Toohey

Development projects have various stages, from the initial analysis to deployment and support. One of the more time-consuming but ultimately invaluable part of the production stage is the design of the application user interface. I say design verses development, as it is a best practice to not dive into coding the UI, but rather create mock-ups that your users/project champions/et al can review.

This stage can not only limit pre-deployment UI development scope creep, but it can also allow the user to communicate some assumed user experience... since they can actually see the application.

While 'shops -- that is, mockups generated by an image editor like Adobe Photoshop or Gimp -- are often employed, wireframes are becoming the preferred method for quickly creating consumer-facing mock-ups.

Mockingbird, which can be found at www.GoMockingBird.com, is a simple online wireframe editor that allows you to not only create and export wireframes (to PNG or PDF), but also share and embed via IFRAME.

Built using the Cappuccino Web Framework, it's a really slick and intuitive tool for creating clean wireframes. My free (and simple) registration allows me to create, save, and load my wireframes for revisions... since you know the customer is going to want to see the menu on the right-hand side of the page or the navigator on the top of the View.

Mockingbird is certainly something that I'm going to be using both in my day-to-day development as well as on this site (showing you mockups of upcoming projects, etc.), so I'll give it a strong recommend and urge you to check it out!