Re. use on the web, I think the issue might be that it simply is not clear how to publish to the web or edit online. Perhaps this had to do with the version of B’iq I was using?

Re. actual drawing/sketching: I think I just want to have a pen and eraser tool to be able to sketch quick custom elements, such as just adding a circle or an X or a line here or there. Drawing something in Illustrator or whatever, I think would be too time-consuming.

Re. sharing/embedding , I think it would be good to generate a JS/Html snippet that one could plop into any web page.

And yes, Quick Add definitely needs to be made more prominent.

But as I said before, I think you’ve done great work with this tool - keep it up!

Re Gliffy: the Gliffy guys were my inspiration as a small “web office plugins” company, and I certainly think our offerings are complementary. They are a much broader tool which can be used for many types of diagrams, Mockups is extremely focused on GUI sketching.

Access / Setup - you CAN use this on the web. Both in “demo mode” on my site (which is fully functional but with a nag every 5 minutes), and as a plugin for Confluence, JIRA or XWiki. The Desktop version is designed for when you are offline, or if you like to save your data on your hard-drive, old skool! :) Plus the Desktop version supports more keyboard shortcuts than the web versions and is a bit snappier, so you might want to edit offline then export/import into the web version for collaboration. A purely SaaS version of Mockups (subscription based) is not available at this point in time, I’m still on the fence on whether to offer it or not.

User Interface - I know, I need some skinning love for the affordances…I’m not a great visual designer…that said, I am pretty happy with the structure of the app. I agree that the library might fit better to the right, and that the tabs might look better at the top. Let me try it out.

Re: my UI blurring in the mockup’s UI, is it because of my use of dark gray? I cleaned things up a bit since your review, with a more consistent use of blue for highlights in the chrome (green is now reserved for the mockup).

Actual Drawing / Sketching - can you tell me a bit more about what you’d want to sketch? Are the Arrows, Curly Braces, Scratch-Out and other controls in the Markup category not enough? For custom widgets, why not draw it in Illustrator/Photoshop/paper and pencil and bring it in as an image? Those tools are certainly better than what I could build for free-form drawing.

Sharing/Embedding: yup, look at the videos of Mockups for Confluence, JIRA and XWiki on my site for examples of people collaborating on GUI designs with Mockups.

Widget Library: so sorry you didn’t catch the power of “Quick Add”. It obviously needs to be highlighted / explained better - it’s not a standard search, it’s more like Spotlight or Quicksilver. It’s really powerful, for instance I work with the UI Library hidden at all times (View Menu), and only use Quick Add. I have a few ideas on how to improve the design to make this more clear, stay tuned. Thanks for forcing me to take another look at it!

Paper Prototyping - yes! And now with 1.5 you’ll have a built-in “Print” support, streamlined! :)

Community Library - I’m working on it with the help of a few customers, stay tuned.

Sketch Pad: you can hide it today (View Menu)!

Thanks again for the feedback!
Peldi

Then again, this also filters out the ‘good’ @replies. I use an RSS feed from Summize/Twitter search to track all mentions of my twitter username, several other usernames, and the names of companies and organizations I am associated with.

I’ve reached a point on a few occasions in the recent past at which I’ve thought “I may as well just build this” so complex does the prototype start to become. It can be a hard balance to strike.

I wouldn’t necessarily agree that they’re just for non-technical users, but you do sometimes wonder whether they’re helping or hindering, particularly during the more hectic iterative processes!