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

You can now download the PowerPoint 2007 version of the iPhone Photo Album App and I’m happy to report that it’s been successfully tested by quite a few users.

The only problems reported have been several severe jaw dropping cases and people falling off their Aeron chairs. So just exercise extreme caution when putting that sucker in presentation mode: MockApp won’t be responsible for any injuries to you or people you show your mockups to.

So what’s coming next? Well, I have quite a few requests for UI elements to add which will come out in the next version. So if you have any requests, please do shoot them over.

I’m also brushing up on Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines document and am toying with the idea of formatting the MockApp library and template files to be more consistent with Apple’s official standards. That way, even people who don’t like to read 100+ page PDF’s will have some clue as to what Apple considers good app design just by using MockApp. And I hear Apple knows a thing or 2 about good design.

Does that sound like it could be useful? Anything else you’d like to see in MockApp aside for having code come out. Please email me at dotan@mockapp.com with your wildest ideas and fantasies (related to MockApp of course).

Alright, you guys are officially spoiled: Not only did I manage to get a debugged version of MockApp for PowerPoint 2007 out tonight (instead of Friday) but I even polished a few cosmetic compatibility details to make the PowerPoint version look as good as the Keynote version.

BUT… the price of MockApp is going up: it’s no longer free. The new price is for you to perform one of the following actions (takes less than 2 minutes):

So I got my PowerPoint 2007 yesterday and started playing with it on my old PC to figure out why the template file wasn’t working in ppt ‘07. The good news is: I’m 99% sure I nailed the problem and will soon release a working Powerpoint version of MockApp.

For those geeky enough to care, what happened is this: I had set the Keynote template to “hyperlinks only”. The purpose of this setting is that you can’t go to the next slide just by clicking anywhere on the screen in presentation mode. That way the user has to navigate your demo by clicking on hyperlinked buttons, links, etc. that you define in your mockup (isn’t that cool?). Well… PowerPoint 2007 doesn’t think so: it sort of freaks out by flickering the mouse pointer between the hourglass and the arrow mode while consuming a ton of CPU.

Turns out, the solution is to disable Keynote’s hyperlinks-only mode before exporting to PowerPoint. And then I can open in PowerPoint and add the same setting back in by unchecking “on mouse click” in the advance slide section of the Animations menu.

For those who don’t care, if you read this far, you’re kidding yourself: you are a geek whether you like it or not!

Good news: MockApp v0.6 is here (Keynote version only for now) and with a lot more goodness inside.

More good news: I just received my ppt 2007 for PC from Amazon so I’ll be debugging and hopefully releasing the PC/PowerPoint version later this week. Hey, what’s a few more days when you’ve waited years for MockApp…

Thanks to your feedback I was able to focus on important UI elements that were missing in v0.5. So let’s see… what’s new in v0.6?:

As always, if you can think of a UI element you’d really like me to add or if you feel the urge to give me a big kiss (I prefer checks) please email me at feedback@mockapp.com.

There are a bunch of rapid prototyping tools out there. So why bother with MockApp? Here are 3
main reasons for that:

Like a good pair of slippers

A prototyping tool should help you create great apps. So if you’re not comfortable using the tool, chances are people aren’t going to be comfortable using your apps either. That’s why a good prototyping tool should be like that pair of well worn slippers you’ve had for years and would not trade for the world. And what’s the graphic software equivalent to that pair of slippers to most people? That’s right: Powerpoint (or Keynote if you like extra fuzz in your slippers). Everyone owns PowerPoint or Keynote and most business people use them daily as a weapon of choice to put co-workers to sleep. And that’s precisely why I chose PowerPoint and Keynote to create MockApp’s templates (not the sleep part, just the familiarity).

Wireframes never get anyone excited

When I first started doing UI/UX in 1997 at AGENCY.COM, the school of thought was that you should always do your mockups in wireframes. And man… if a designer caught you putting the slightest hint … Read More

Thanks so much for the incredible response and feedback over the past couple of days. I can’t believe we launched 2 days ago! So let’s see… in 2 days, we got this very positive post by no less than TUAW (the unofficial Apple Weblog). Yayyy! The story got reposted by dozens of blogs in the US and around the world. Twitter almost changed topics from Acorn (I wish!).

More importantly, I got some great feedback to fine tune MockApp for PowerPoint 2007. I can’t believe you guys are making me dust off my old PC laptop and even worse… I have to shell out $70 to buy Micro&#@$ PowerPoint 2007. Not cool.

Anyway, special thanks to our friend Ash who noticed that my UI library was missing the tab bar controller (you know, the little black bar full of icons at the bottom of the iPod app, the iTunes app and a few others). Of course, I omitted that UI component on purpose to see how many of you actually noticed!… Right…

You’ll be pleased to hear that thanks to Ash, I have to work over the week-end to add his freaking tab bar controller and the gazillion icons that come with it. I hope you’re happy. A Jewish holiday on top of that. Way to start year 5770!

So sometime early next week … Read More