Jenni Merrifield's dashboard

This is undoubtedly one of the most useful and major improvements to the application. Combined with the Boundary Hinting Tool this is, IM(NS)HO, one of the best overall updates so far!

DOUBLE Snoopy Dance!

Snoopy Dance!

This is so great Peldi! I really like the "curved corner" option as well.

My only remaining request would be the ability to change the border colour so I could ensure a contrast no matter what colour background I put it over. (i.e., I could change the border to white if it was over a black background). It's also useful for making these "boundary regions" less conspicuous than other lines in the UI (i.e., by setting the colour to a mid-range grey) or to visually differentiate separate boundaries from each other (i.e., header region in blue, footer in red)

Awesome! I look forward to seeing it implemented! – Jenni Merrifield, on December 14, 2009 17:29

It's great to know that you have plans for multiple views of "projects" - it will be useful to be able to see the connections between my wireframes in different ways.

That said, even with the implementation of different view I would still find a list of open files displayed under the "View" or a new "Window" menu to be very helpful, mainly because it will always be faster and take less mental effort for a user to select the name of a specific mockup from a menu than it would be to first change the view of the project to one that makes a representation (name and/or thumbnail) of each file visible at one time, then find the representation of the desired file, selecting that representation and opening the file in the standard "editing" mode. – Jenni Merrifield, on December 11, 2009 22:47

I'm not as concerned about snapping - if it's implemented I'd want to be able to turn it on and off, because sometimes I'm not using a standard grid. I also don't personally require hint titles, though having them wouldn't be a problem.

For my needs, just having a control that is almost identical to the Rectangle control except with no interior fill (i.e., treat as always "100% transparent) and control of the border colour would suffice.

A real solid "nice to have" would be to select border line type, with options for solid, dotted, and dashed as well

Here is an image from a wireframe I did in Visio, before I found Mockups, that shows you an example of "boundary hints". In the upper area, each thumbnail and associated text must fit within a defined area but this area is not actually marked by a line in the final UI. In the lower area, the text must respect certain margin widths, but the space it should be placed in will not be marked by a "real" line in the UI.

One way to implement this would be to allow users to connect to two separate mockup files - one for a link, one for a hover - to the same control. Links are already shown with a blue arrow icon in the lower right corner. Hovers could be shown with some other icon - maybe a "speech balloon" which is reflective of the "rich tooltip" concept that a large majority of hovers represent - in a different corner - top right maybe?

Then, in presentation mode, always show the hover icon and when the hover icon is clicked, the presentation switches to the specified "hover" file.

Any file that has been opened from a "hover" link in another file should work just like any other file. One "nice to have" would be if presentation mode could automatically returns to the calling file if the user clicks anywhere that isn't set as a link or a hover.

Awesome! Especially now that we have the PDF output which uses the tab order to create the pages of the file, this means we can order the pages in whatever way is most meaningful before creating the PDF and no longer have to worry about what we name each file. – Jenni Merrifield, on December 07, 2009 22:01

Yep, looks fixed to me. :) – Jenni Merrifield, on November 02, 2009 00:53

That's not to say I wouldn't like having zoom - In fact I think it's one of the biggest "flaws" that Mockups currently exhibits. But as I also have a development background I recognize that prioritizing the what depends a great deal on the how. :) – Jenni Merrifield, on October 29, 2009 17:23

Are you serious? With weekly updates Peldi has made many major and minor improvements to the application over the past year, even if Zoom isn't one of them.

Remember, while asking for zoom is as easy as clicking a "like" button or posting a comment, actually implementing the feature properly may potentially require a major overhaul of the application at the code level. It's far better for Peldi's team to attack less complex feature requests in addition to bug fixes before embarking on more complex new features.

Personally, I'm impressed by the development history of the application, and strongly believe that the many "missing" features we desire will eventually be implemented as time and resources allow. – Jenni Merrifield, on October 29, 2009 15:21

Here's a section out of a recent mockup I've created that relates to my request:


Notice the "tooltip" balloon that's coming off of the link showing the user's account name. In a "live" situation this tooltip appears when the mouse pointer hovers over the link while clicking the link opens up the user's profile page.

If this was the only tooltip interaction on the page I could probably get away with creating a single mockup for the page this UI comes from, leaving the tooltip visible and then setting the link value for the username link control to open the mockup for a user profile. Unfortunately, there are several links across the entire mockup which also present a tooltip on hover. Placing so many tooltips in the mockup at one time not only causes visual clutter but they can also start covering up most of the main UI.

I could create one main page without any tooltips and then copy it several times and add one tooltip to each copy and then set the link value of each appropriate link to bring up the appropriate "tooltip" page, but there are a couple of problems with this approach. One is that, once the link value of the link control is set so that clicking moves to the tooltip mockup then it isn't available to be used for moving to the user profile mockup. Another is that I now have to manage many almost identical mockup files - one for each tooltip.

There are probably other workarounds for exhibiting this behaviour within presentation mode, but I'd prefer to have a mechanism designed specifically for showing user interactions in response to a pointer hovering over a control rather than clicking a control. (Currently, I just don't use presentation mode and instead create the multiple files, export everything to PNG and create web pages using jQuery to make hovering show the tooltips and clicking go to the next mockup page.)

:-j(enni)