In the light of Keynote as a recently popular tool for creating wireframes, here comes another emerging stencil for all to use. As the project name suggests, the template is free, comes with various form elements, modal boxes, and a number of useful header styles. One thing that stands out is the way the stencil is being positioned within github, and the author openly invites others to fork it, tweak it and improve it. Without implying otherwise it would be interesting to see if UX folk will be actually able to push, pull, branch and merge files under git to move the project forward. Or perhaps the technical barrier and the high learning curve behind git commands are just too complicated for the non-developer? Either way, thanks Colin for another cool project.

Grab the files (and collaborate) right here.

In Colin’s own words:

I’m working on some a free wireframing toolkit for creating interactive prototypes with Apple’s Keynote. It’s the best wireframe tool around, and I’ve been using it to build interfaces for web applications.

Credits: Colin Nederkoorn

Here is another experiment in the form of an open source jQuery plugin named onProximityFade. What it does is it fades tagged elements (requiring a CSS class of “fadeBox”) depending on their proximity to the mouse cursor. The idea emerged after a subtle irritation with long lists of repeating links which sometimes feel as they receive too much attention on a page. So the intention is twofold. First, to visually deemphasize repeating and predictable elements throughout a page and thus achieve greater simplicity. Secondly, use gradual feedback to invite users to find actionable elements by using ranged values (the closer you get, the greater visibility). Any thoughts? Would love to hear them.

Have a peek at the demo or fork the code at github.

Credits: Jakub Linowski

Briefs is a little application toolkit for iPhone based prototypes released by Rob Rhyne. The process is as follows. First, you simply use a visual design tool of your choice to export your image files as scenes or actors. You then attach actions (behaviours) to your actors (screen elements) by writing a BriefScript with the provided syntax. Once that’s done, you compile the script into a binary plist with a .brieflist extension on a Mac and copy it to the phone. Sharing the Briefcast (“brief://”) prototype is also possible by placing it on a server.

A cool idea, but there is a small catch. If I understand correctly, the whole thing is still waiting to get approved to the App Store and there is some uncertainty if it will or not get accepted. Either way, the code is also open sourced and should be available on git hub, so at least it should be available for internal development purposes. In Rob’s own words:

The Briefs toolkit was created for rapidly building & iterating design concepts. It allows one to quickly prototype those concepts and run them on iPhone OS devices. These prototypes run directly on the phone, like actual apps, but require much less time and code to produce than a prototype built using only the native APIs. Less code means faster design cycles followed by more a efficient development cycle.

Find out more at giveabrief.com.

GestureWorks has released 20 something gesture icons for their Flash and Flex development environment. Although their multitouch library is geared at developers, the icons still look interesting in their own right. A lot of the interactions supported include two handed, as well as multi finger gestures. The downloadable library comes in various formats (PNG, PDF and EPS). Enjoy.

Also, I just created the gestures tag to keep track of all these related posts.

Credits: GestureWorks

K-Sketch, The Kinetic Sketch Pad is a pretty cool piece of software that came out of the Human-Computer Interaction and Design group from the University of Washington and is lead by Prof. Richard Davis. As the name indicates, the software allows to create quick sketches in time with a pretty simple and lightweight interface. Users can draw free form shapes and then transform those objects in a recording mode. The result is an animation composed of various objects that have their own animating paths.

I still haven’t tried out this tool on a real UI design project, but the concept is definitely inspirational and so I thought to share it. The K-Sketch project opens up the possibility and idea of sketching in the context of a timeline, which I think is quite novel in itself. If the desire of designers to express interactions seamlessly with the use of animation is strong enough (which I think it is), my guess is that we’ll be seeing more and more of functionality such as this in our prototyping tools of the future.

Download it and try it out yourself.

Here is another explanation straight off from their website:

K-Sketch allows ordinary computer users to create informal animations from sketches. Current tools for creating animation are extremely complex. This makes it difficult for designers to prototype animations and nearly impossible for novices to create them at all. Simple animation systems exist but severely restrict the types of motion that can be represented. To guide the design K-Sketch, we have conducted field studies into the needs of professional and novice animators. These studies showed the wide variety of motions that users desire in informal animations and indicate how to prioritize these types of motion. Our design allows the most important types of motion to be defined with pen gestures, and gives visual feedback for coordination of events.

Credits: Prof. Richard Davis

Some time ago, Chris Neale showed off an awesome video of his stop motion animation prototypes. More recently, he has now published a software tool he built in Processing to create such videos. The tool is quite simple and basically allows users to capture screens with a webcam and export them to a folder. The Animationizer also supports a playback feature at 12 frames per second. Chris’ approach is to playback the animations and re-record them with a separate tool such as Screenflow or Silverback. (I also found CamStudio as an open source alternative). The tool is free of charge and comes with a Creative Commons Share Alike license. Thanks Chris! In his own words:

The Animationizer makes stop-frame animations quickly and easily using a webcam. I put it together to help make early prototypes for user experience design projects I’ve been working on. It might also be useful for art projects or science experiments – or maybe just to keep the kids occupied on a rainy afternoon.

For installation, basically you need to install Processing first and then download the code from his website. For those users on Windows, you might also need the WinVDIG for QT driver.

Recently a new version of the Pencil Project has come out which brings forth a set of new features. For those who don’t know the Pencil is an open source and community driven, UI design tool which originated as a Firefox extension (best extension of 2008). This new version however has stepped out of the browser and people can install this as a stand alone application. Other new features include the ability to interlink pages, export to various file formats, as well the creation of a Personal Collection (a library of sorts).

Another pretty cool feature is the Clipart Browser. The Pencil allows you to search the open directory over at clipart.org and insert SVG graphics straight into your mockup. Love it. :) Other than that, one minor area which could use some improvement is the handling of a group of items or reusing them across screens. Quite often UI tools either come with some sort of grouping or master functionality which seems to be missing here.

Give it a spin right here.

Batiste Bieler has just recently released an wireframing tool with both the python source and a demo available publicly. The tool, as its tagline implies, is quite simple and looks like it is just the beginning of a project. For now, users can start of by creating a wireframe by first specifying a grid on which to work on. Further, components can be inserted into the page from a pull down menu. I believe that in the next release Batiste will be opening up an administrative panel to allow users to create new components. Of course all components are dragable, resizable and editable. Excited to see some grassroots projects happening.

Check out the demo.

Credits: Batiste Bieler

Clickframes is an open source software requirements tool which takes an XML notation as a source and generates a clickable document. First the requirements are written in the form of an appspec, are then fed into an interpreting tool (such as the hosted CLIPr), which in turn generates interactive documentation. Now don’t get me wrong, the generated documentation looks nothing like traditional wireframes. Clickframes are requirement abstractions which do not contain any structural information about various UI elements’ position or size (typical wireframe meat). Clickframes do however indicate the input elements which reside on each page as well as the paths of actions and the resulting outcomes that users can take. I find this interesting as this tool takes a stronger stand on the element of time as represented through such interactions. Hence, this tool visualizes cause and effect of user interactions explicitly, as opposed to having to be discovered.

Another definite Clickframe analogy which comes to mind is that of an interactive and auto-generated page description diagram. What both page description diagrams and clickframes in my opinion lack is the concreteness of elements in a given space which have been traded off for abstraction. For this, I assume there would be designers who start of projects by sketching and designers who begin by writing requirements. Perhaps Clickframes also resonate with what Ryan Singer of 37signals was speaking of when he mentioned that before the pen is laid to paper, a UI model should exist.

Credits: Jonathan Abbett & William Crawford of Beacon16

Plumb is an open source tool (GitHub source) for drawing out placeholders on top of the Blueprint framework. You can simply draw out the boxes and it will automatically create the HTML for you. So what’s in it for me you ask? I noticed in the past that there is a community of HTML prototypers out there who like to do their interactive wireframes with grid systems in their most native form. With that, I thought this tool might be interesting to some. Enjoy.

Oh, and if you haven’t noticed already, I have a thing for open source software. Hence a separate opensource tag just appeared in the right navigation bar to separate out these types of projects. Cheers!

Credits: Michael Daines