Balsamiq Mockups is quite a popular Adobe AIR wireframing tool and for very good reasons. The main person behind this interesting tool, Giacomo ‘Peldi’ Guilizzoni, was perhaps one of the first to tap into the power of sketchy-like wireframes, which is a visible style used through the software. Mockups’ users reaffirm over and over again that the tool works great for early phase ideation where lower fidelity conceptual work matters more. With this sketchy feel, Balsamiq helps to steer the focus more toward bigger picture ideas away from visual detail. This degree of incompletion in the generated mockups also invites more feedback and stirs discussion.

The feature set is also widely expansive. Various types of elements such as radio boxes, buttons, and text areas can be dragged straight into the workplace. Contents of various elements such as pull down menus or tabbed navigation can often be edited very rapidly by simply double clicking them and modifying the appropriate text formatting. More so, Mockupstogo.net has emerged which hosts a variety of user contributed UI patterns, speeding up the design process even further by allowing the sharing and reuse of components.

Pretty cool piece of software if you ask me, and more importantly super friendly people behind it.

Download it from here to give it a try.

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