Re: [mockdown]
- From:
- Ben Johnson
- Date:
- 2011-09-13 @ 19:10
hey Mike-
I've been actively working on it. I worked on a drag-and-drop visual
editor for Mockdown for a month and it was looking pretty slick but after
sitting down with people and walking them through it I realized that it
actually wasn't very useful. There are already plenty of drag-and-drop
mockup and design tools. It's ultimately not a tool for designers or
business people. Someone using it really needs to understand technical
concepts like inheritance, data types, and data binding to really get the
most out of the tool.
So I scraped that and I'm working on a developer-centric tool again. There
are a couple things I'm focusing on before I do a release:
1. Clean up and simplify the interface.
2. Mockup interaction visualization - I integrated Graphviz so that links
between mockups can be laid out and visualized. Similar to a sitemap but
with the ability to be more granular.
3. Asset export - Export elements in the interface to pngs. Similar to
Photoshop slices but more flexible.
4. Create examples for people to reference. So far I have the Mail app and
Phone app mocked up. Working on Tweetbot now.
5. Finish iOS library - I had a good start but I wanted to clean it up and
make it syntactically similar to the native iOS API.
6. Additional graphics support - Some of the iOS elements needed more
complex graphics so I added things like masks, strokes, color fills,
shadows, blurs, Perlin noise, etc. You can recreate a lot of Photoshop
inside of Mockdown now and it's all declarative and reusable.
7. Create solid documentation - The language is simple but there needs to
be a good tutorial and a good API reference for the base components as
well as the iOS components.
I also want to a Visual Diffs so that you can create feature branches for
your mockups in Git and then compare what's changed across your entire
project for a single feature or between commits. It'll also allow you to
export to PDF so that all stakeholders could visually see what needs to be
done.
I know it sounds like a lot but most of what's listed above is done. I'm
going to try to finish the Tweetbot app this week, write some docs next
week and then do a release.
Ben
On Sep 13, 2011, at 12:37 PM, Mike Caskey wrote:
> What's the latest news on Mockdown?
>
>
> On Sep 13, 2011, at 12:23 PM, John Legg wrote:
>
>>
>> John Legg
>> 714-715-6279
>> hblegg@me.com
>> twitter
>> www.my911app.com
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>