MockupData

Mockup Screens 4 Preview!
December 27, 2008

I got many e-mails asking how new release is going, what will it bring, when will it be available and so on. Well, thanks for your patience we are almost there! Last bugs are being fixed, and those of you who wanted to beta test and contacted me will get the download link in ten days or so. As some of you have already guessed, the hardest part was to add many new features, and at the same time improve productivity, ease of use and robustness. I’m happy to say that I’m confident “new” Mockup Screens is as simple to use now as it was before, even with much stronger functionality built into it.

In short, new release does much better job than the old one. For one it’s much more robust, being completely redesigned and rewritten during past 14 months (wow, it went by so fast!). Other major improvements are the very same you kept requesting:

  • Both much nicer and more “standard” interface – single main screen, native windows controls and dialogs, etc
  • Ability to switch look and feel at any time among Black and white, Windows and Web look and feel
  • Finer control of the mocked screens’ element formatting: font color, font size, bold, italic, underline, etc

Not to keep you waiting any longer, here is the screenshot so you can see by yourself what I’m talking about. You have to click on it to really see the details.

http://mockupscreens.com/uploads/images/new_interface.png

And below is the same mockup displayed in two skins: “Windows” and “Black and white”. Again, click on it to see the details.

Among great many other improvements, below are those that had also been much requested by you:

  • Jump to another screen from any element while in slideshow mode or in exported HTML, and not just from “mark” icons
  • Comments for any element (instead of having to put “mark” icons to comment something), along with comments being more prominent as important part of the Mockup Screens functionality, and with many small improvements in comments’ exporting, printing, word-wrapping, the way how comments are displayed on screen, etc
  • Improved “table editor” so you can draw and populate your tables more easily, and even paste the actual data from Excel
  • Printing from MockupScreens directly, instead of exporting project to HTML so it could be printed
  • Copying screen snapshots directly to Word (or other programs), with no need to export snapshots to image files first
  • Importing and exporting whole scenarios or just copy-pasting them between different projects
  • Better performance, especially with large files with many screens crowded with elements
  • Export to XML so the mockups can be transformed by xsl-transformations to actual programming code
  • Most elements can be shown as “disabled”, to indicate that they are read only for example

Once this major release is “out and running”, there are more improvements to come – and soon, since very rewarding but extremely time consuming part of the work will be done. And of course I hope you’ll again be here helping me decide how to make Mockup Screens better, what to change and what ideas to implement. Thank you, folks!