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Ask HN: alternatives to Balsamiq Mockups?
I've been using Balsamiq Mockups for two years now but lately I've found myself becing increainsgly disatisfied with the product. The reason is that I lack certain interactivity features that would make life so such easier, e.g. having widgets you can actually interact with when in preview mode or be able to design a carousel in one single mockup file and not having to create one mockup for each content pane.
These types of interactivity aren't eye candy or "fun" things to have, but rather pretty crucial when rapidly creating prototypes and their nonexistence makes me groan each time I launch Mockups.
So I'm looking for alternatives to Balsamiq Mockups that has the same look and feel (lo-fi, faux paper prototyping) but embraces the things I've mentioned (Balsamiq seems to have taken a stand against this).
- vitovito 15y agoFor a while, I maintained an exporter that would turn a BMML (or series of BMML files) into interactive HTML and JavaScript, which allowed me to customize the JS to provide that interactivity. I discontinued it after Balsamiq offered clickable PDFs. It was more work to do the interactions in JS than it was to just clone the mockup and do each key frame as a new mockup. http://vi.to/bmml/ http://vi.to/bmml/ This is otherwise one of my biggest beefs with Balsamiq: I'd love to be able to easily prototype advanced interactions, essentially with motion graphics, but can't. I suspect tools like Radi, Adobe Edge, Sencha Animator, Hype or Maqetta will eventually support both the "quick sketchy wireframes" and the "complex prototypes" use cases and replace Balsamiq for me.