Until I stumbled across balsamiq, my all-time favorite Micro ISV was Ed Hamrick of Hamrick Software, developer of VueScan. I’ve never met Ed but I did spend several hours on the phone and many email exchanges with him a few years ago when I started Pixingo (a Mini ISV). Ed has a fantastic product and business – the type to envy if you are a “do it yoursefer”. Hamrick held the spot as “super hero” in my mind for more than a decade, then along comes Peldi Guilizzoni of balsamiq.

While I was doing some research on Crowdsourcing, I came across a Blog post on ReadWriteWeb on helping Twitter find a revenue model – maybe the ultimate in crowdsourcing! As I read through the comments I came across Peldi Guilizzoni’s posts on his use of Twitter for targeted marketing of his company’s products. The first thought through my mind was “Brilliant!” (followed closely by “When’s lunch?). Peldi is the brain and braun behind balsamiq. As I dug in to the company (I hadn’t even looked at what their product was yet!) I discovered a kindred entrepreneurial spirit! Then I looked at the product, Mockups!

Mockups is a newgen application for mocking up software user interfaces. Sort of paper prototyping on steroids. Those that know me also know that I am passionate about usability and involving users as early in the inception and design phase as possible. I’ve played with a lot of prototyping tools in the past and am an avid paper prototyper. In fact, my company shipped Genesys in 1989 – a tool that allowed a developer to draw their user interface and Genesys would generate source code in their choice of 65816 Assembly Language, Pascal, C or Apple RES format. [This is COOL! A quick Google turned up this link on Genesys: http://www.whatisthe2gs.apple2.org.za/genesys/ It even has a screenshot of our manual!]

Mockups was designed to be as simple as possible but yet allow rapid design and design exploration. It has a retro hand-drawn look and appeal to it too. As a newgen app, it can run as a desktop application on WIndows, Macs or Linux, as well as in a browser or even embedded in a Wiki! Versions supporting the commercial Atlassian Confluence or OpenSource XWiki are available. This is truly brilliant and shows how the power of Wikis can be very effectively exploited for team-based product design as well as getting customers involved in the design process.

I’ve been using the trial version of Mockups heavily for a day now (both desktop and XWiki versions) and have a good handle on how it works and where it’s strengths and weaknesses (very few) are. In many ways, Mockups is like a drawing program with a library of over 60 pre-drawn UI controls. These look just like you drew them with paper and pencil!

(from the balsamiq samples)

I think the hand-drawn look helps reinforce that notion that this is a design idea and not a polished product. I used to use Photoshop with a collection of UI images to build screen designs that looked so real that users just assumed they were a final product and got bogged down in little details and not the big picture around usability. Mockup allows the designer and test subject to see the bigger picture of usability.

Just for grins, I used Mockups to prototype a Fly Tying database product I developed a few years ago. It took all of 5 minutes – without having read any on-line help – to create the main screen and several dialogs. It would have taken me longer with paper and pencil since I do a lot of erasing!

Mockups is so easy and fun to use that I found myself drawing designs for several product ideas I have had floating in my head. Now I have captured these and can share them with others. The XWiki embedded version of Mockups automatically versions edits – a very cool feature that allows you to see how an idea evolved over time. Since the mockup is embedded on a Wiki page, you can annotate, comment and collaborate seamlessly.

I’m sure that I will have more to say about balsamiq and Mockups in future posts, but for now, if you are a software developer or designer, give Mockups a serious look.

Back in “the day” we dialed in to on-line communities called bulletin board systems (BBS) using 300 baud modems. My first modem was even acoustically coupled! This was back in the mid 1970s. There were relatively few communities back then – basically any individual with a personal computer, 1 or more modems connected to it, and some central theme or topic could set these up. It was tough to even find what was out there since there were no central directories for these message boards. But some of these BBSes became very valuable for knowledge sharing amongst interested users from all over the country and sometimes, the world.

Even back then I had a lot of interests and I used this new technology (which, of course, was another interest) to find experts and discover knowledge. From the beginning, it was easy to find BBSes that supported communities of early computer geeks – hardware message boards helped me build my first Z80-based computer from scratch and programming boards helped me learn to program it in assembly language. But I also found and participated in BBS sites that specialized in Studebaker cars and their restoration (my first car was a 1957 Silver Hawk), black powder gun making and shooting, archery, remote controlled model airplanes, remote controlled model cars, and one of my favorites, a fly fishing BBS with trip reports, techniques and fly tying patterns.

The Usenet and commercial BBSes with subscription fees started to emerge – CompuServe, Q-Link/AOL, and too many others to recall. By the mid 80s you could, with a little effort, find information on most any interest you might have. What was amazing about all of these, was that they had very active user communities that were willing to share their knowledge, help newbies, and just socialize. These were the precursors to today’s Web Forums. I think many of the earliest participants may have come out of the Amateur Radio world (btw, amateur radio operators were one of, if not the, first to use technology to create virtual communities consisting of members from all over the planet. They still do in fact).

These early BBSes offered 2 primary capabilities; 1) the ability to traverse a file directory and download or upload documents and 2) threaded discussions with other members. Virtual communities were simple but effective then. There was a lot of camaraderie on these early BBS sites with very few lurkers – most sites had near 100% participation. This was probably due to the fact that It took a fair amount of effort to find and visit these sites, so users that stuck around after their first visit or 2 stayed engaged.

As the internet became accessible to the masses, most of these BBSes gave way to Usenet and commercial forums like CompuServe. For a short time in the early 1990s, Gopher was hot but it quickly gave way to the new, very cool World Wide Web (WWW). The Web really lowered the accessibility bar (a good thing BTW). Now people from all over the world can form communities for all topics imaginable. In just a few decades a completely new, universally accessible and extremely rich communication and social networking infrastructure was created more or less organically. Even though Social Computing is a hot topic today, people have been leveraging computers and networks to help and learn from one another for quite some time.

Here are a few of my favorite communities (in no particular order) in which I actively participate:

Pelican Porsche Forum

Early Porsche 911S Registry

Fly Tying and Rod Building Forums

New England Kayak Fishing

RC Groups

Facebook

LinkedIn

Photography-On-The-Net