Mockup Tools
Found a great article over at raywenderlich.com by Riccardo D’Antoni. I should point out just how much of a Godsend this article was. I’m assembling / prototyping an interactive audio application for the IDM22 Interface & Information Design module – needless to say I’ve done literally tons of research into the best way of building working, clickable prototypes of an iPad app.
At first I was going to go the Flash route – which would be a great way to do this – but obviously it won’t run on iOS…then I thought about the going the Fireworks route with clickable hotspots. This could possibly work- but doesn’t really show the “sexiness” that I’d like to get across.
At present I’m mocking up screens in Flash, firing out png’s & re-assembling in Keynote. There are 2 main reasons for this :
1) I’m quick in Flash (and its easy to export graphics) and Keynote is actually a great way of assembling clickable prototypes, and
2) We also have to present the app in 2 weeks time – if I’m already building a clickable prototype in Keynote, it will be pretty straightforward to build the presentation.
So far, this all seems great. The problem I have is showing how the audio manipulation works. This is the difficult part. Here is where most of these apps / techniques fall short. The audio is still a problem area but there are some good options out there now for prototyping iOS apps. The drag and drop functionality is difficult to get across on a prototype. Axure can do this, but can’t (to the best of my knowledge) handle audio.
Indigo Studio is another great prototyping option for web, tablet & mobile platforms but at $495 it is expensive and like many other tools does not have drag & drop functionality – but like Briefs it does have swipes, double taps etc.
Available at http://www.infragistics.com/products/indigo-studio
So, here’s hoping this article may be useful for others in the same situation.