Since the iPad was announced on Wednesday, several people have emailed me asking whether there will be a MockApp for the iPad.

The answer is yes but I can’t get started quite yet: the way I made MockApp for iPhone/iPod Touch in the first place was by taking lots of screenshots of the various UI elements on my iPhone and then “drawing” over them in Keynote to ensure they were high-fidelity renderings of the real thing.

I obviously can’t do that with MockApp quite yet for the obvious reason that I don’t own an iPad. I’ll be first in line at the Apple store when the iPad comes out, camping overnight if I have to but that still 58 days away (yes, I’m counting the days!).

If anyone can place a good word with Steve and get me an iPad sooner, I promise I’ll whip out a MockApp for iPad in no time!

I must add that I’ve been quite annoyed with all the whiny so-called “mixed” reviews out there about the iPad, including some pretty embarrassing ones on NPR, which I otherwise adore. I guess journalists love counting features as much as Microsoft does and pretty much decide to ignore the human interaction revolution that the new format and gesture vocabulary introduce. They also have a very short memory: Go count the features of the original iPod compared to the feature-rich MP3 players it was competing with at the time and you get the idea of what’s about to happen with the iPad.

My personal opinion is that the iPad is the awesome first iteration of a device that will truly revolutionize how most people use computers in this decade. I’m willing to bet (and am betting in Apple stock right now!) that the tablet format will supplant all other forms of traditional computers including laptops, desktops, crapbooks, etc. within the next 10 years.

Can I get my iPad now, Steve pretty please?

I am pleased to announce that it is now possible to view your MockApp iPhone app mockups on your iPhone. Your mockups will not only looks GORGEOUS but their hyperlinks will work too! Animations? Nah… but you can’t have everything working: it’s only a mockup, remember?

The instructions to get your MockApp mockups on your iPhone are posted here.

As you’ll see, the process is pretty simple already but I’m still trying to simplify the process even more:

So if any of you smart iPhone app developers out there want to help, I’d love to collaborate:

Wouldn’t be cool to build a dedicated MockApp viewer app that users would sign-into and would automatically retrieve their mockups from the cloud? If we could avoid the PDF conversion, that would be sweet too: Maybe users upload their Keynote or ppt and the PDF conversion happens automatically on the server… OK, now I’m getting way to excited so I better stop.

Happy mockups!

I know Google already made available a web app version of Wave, which is impressive given how early in the product lifecycle Wave is. Still, it comes with some usability issues given the UI limitations of web apps. So I couldn’t help but try to figure out what a real Google Wave iPhone App should to look like.

So I managed to make a half-decent mockup* using MockApp and thought it would be fun to make this mockup into a video that actually looks like there is a finished Wave App out there.

Hopefully, it won’t freak people out: I’m sure Lars, Stephanie and the rest of the Wave team at Google have a good sense of humor! (I still want my Wave invite).

Anyway, I hope you like it and more importantly, I hope you’ll come up with your own version of Google Wave and email it in. I promise to publish mockups of the best Google Wave iPhone App ideas you send me.

* Considering I haven’t yet gotten a Wave invite yet, so I worked with what I had: random Flick’r screenshots and a few Youtube videos of Google Wave (a little like chasing Bigfoot). Thanks for all of you who offered to send me Google Wave invites! I did get one in the end.

Alright, I admit the two 9-minute-videos I cranked out yesterday are pretty detailed, which is great for you guys who want to know everything about MockApp but they may be a tad slow to sit through for your partner, your boss, your VC… you know all these people with short attention span who may not care quite as much about MockApp as you do, believe it or not.

This video has the advantage of being only 30-seconds-long without a peep from me (I’m sure your partner will appreciate that too)… and you can even dance to it.

Since I’m based in LA, I figured the least I could do was to release a video of Mockapp in action. And don’t try to make me come back to Twitter like Miley Cyrus. I’m not leaving.

Please do rate the hell out if these videos (positive I hope!) and feel free to repost all over the place.

For all of you cheapskates who have been complaining that MockApp only works in Keynote ‘09, I just posted a Keynote ‘08 version. It should work OK but since Keynote ‘08 doesn’t support advanced gradients, all those beautiful gradients I almost lost my sight reproducing in Keynote ‘09 are converted into hard cold images you won’t be able to mess with. If you weren’t planning on changing the colors or playing with the gradients you probably won’t care but otherwise it’s sort of a pain.

So how much is Keynote ‘09 you ask? (OK, now I’m going to sound like I’m trying to sell you something but I guarantee I’m not making a penny on this) Amazon sells the whole iWork ‘09 suite for $57. That’s not just Keynote ‘09 with the advanced gradients and all. You get Pages ‘09 and Numbers ‘09 too. Or if you prefer, for about the same price you might be able to get a dusty copy of MS-Office 1997 for PC on eBay…

MockApp, the most successful piece of tweetware* ever made, just released version 1.0, which is a huge upgrade over v0.7. For those who used a previous version of MockApp, you will barely recognize your favorite iPhone prototyping tool given the number of aspects that have been (hopefully) improved:

And best of all… the price for this fantastic piece of Tweetware is still the same: one tweet or one blog post (or facebook update, etc.) And no: there are no free upgrades: in other words, if you tweeted for MockApp 0.7 or earlier, you must … Read More

As I’m putting the final touches to MockApp 1.0, I just wanted to give you a sneak preview of a couple more pages from the new MockApp library file.

The typography connoisseurs may notice that the font has been changed to Helvetica Neue to stay true to the iPhone’s real font. You can also see that ALL the pickers (including date and time pickers) have been redrawn in vector format. And there’s a lot more great stuff coming… Hey, I’ve got to leave a bit of suspense for the release!

So how long? I still have about a day of work to finish-up the UI elements and then a bunch of testing to do in PowerPoint 2007 / PC but I’m still on track to release MockApp 1.0 by end of week granted an all-nighter or two… Stay tuned.

So I making all the UI improvements I’ve been blogging about (see my previous post) and I clearly got carried away:

I’ve received so much insightful feedback from people who love MockApp 0.7 and have started to use it on a daily basis for their UX prototypes that I felt compelled to reward them by incorporating as many of their ideas as possible into version… 1.0!

A picture is worth 1000 words so without further rambling on my part, here’s what MockApp 1.0 is going to look like. This is a screenshot of one of the pages included in the library file.

As you can see, I’ve started incorporating the official name of the UI elements as well as short descriptions about how Apple recommends you use the various UI elements in your iPhone apps. It may not seem like much but it should be quite handy for people who haven’t fully memorized Apple’s 130-page iPhone Human Interface Guidelines…

The template file is also undergoing quite a bit of changes to allow for a sleeker in-context (with iPhone) view of the app and also allow for horizontal screen prototyping. Here’s an screenshot of what the MockApp template home screen will look like:

Obviously, that’s waaaay more changes than I … Read More

Get excited because there’s a bunch of good stuff coming:

New iPhone gestures

For starters, I have a complete set of iPhone finger gestures coming your way as you can see in this pic. I was looking for a way to specify finger motion in MockApp. I reviewed a bunch of existing graphics that people had made and didn’t find anything ground breaking or intuitive enough. Plus I like to take advantage of Powerpoint and Keynote’s ability to animate mockups. That’s why I ended-up making this set from scratch (and a little bit of fingertips too).

So they’ll be animated, they’ll have real finger prints on them (not mine!), and there’s no middle finger involved. Actually there is for the pinch open and pinch close motions. Nothing obscene though I swear.

Free designer iPhone icons: help me choose!

What else… oh yeah: I found this really talented icon designer named Eddie at eddit.com who has a very impressive set of original iPhone icons for sale. Guess what: Eddie was kind enough to let me include a couple dozen of his icons (times the number of different states, that’s a lot of free stuff!) in the next free version of MockApp. Do you realize how spoiled you are?

And the best part is, Eddie is letting me choose which icons to include for free in MockApp. … Read More