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?

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!

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.

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.

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

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…

• A large number of iPhone UI elements have been added and/or vectorized. I think I can now safely assert that MockApp 1.0 includes the most comprehensive vector iPhone UI library of any easy iPhone prototyping tool out there (no, the SDK is not a prototyping tool that my mom could use).
• The library file is now organized and commented based on the ultimate authority: Apple’s iPhone Human Interface guidelines. It even shows examples of some UI elements on an iPhone held by Steve Jobs’ hand (OK, maybe that wasn’t his hand).
• The template file, where you create your mockup, now features a shiny iPhone as backdrop for your app screens with working Home button and all.
• The template file now supports vertical and horizontal iPhone screen mockups.
• And a lot more…

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 tweet again for MockApp 1.0. But the good news is… this time you’ll actually feel like tweeting!

Enjoy MockApp 1.0 and do email me with all your feedback, love letters, hate mail, etc. I particularly like hearing from people like my mom who can not open Photoshop or reprogram a TV remote. They help me make MockApp bullet proof for everyone.

* I haven’t seen any other Tweetware yet.

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.

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 was planning on releasing in the next version. So it’s taking me a bit longer. But I’m hopeful I’ll be able to release MockApp 1.0 for both Keynote and Powerpoint sometime next week.

My objective is to make MockApp so easy to use that anyone who wakes up in the middle of the night with an app idea can quickly and easily mock it up. Not just designers. Not just developers. Anyone.

For those of you who have a blog or can twist the arm of a blogger, please spread the news… iPhone prototyping for the rest of us is 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. I don’t know which ones you guys might want more. They’re all soooo pretty! Help me choose: Let me know by email before Monday which icons from the set you’d like to see included (for example, checkmark icon on 3rd row / 5th icon) and I will get the most popular ones included.

Higher and higher (fidelity)

Want more goodies? There’s more: I am furiously redrawing by hand and in vector format for Powerpoint and Keynote a lot of the original UI elements I drew which weren’t 100% high fidelity. You can see the difference on the next pic of the slider control: it’s night and day. Hard to tell the screenshot from the new version, right?

It’s raining iPhone UI elements

Last but not least, I am slaving at adding a bunch more UI elements that people requested like a login window, a vector search bar, the elements of a contact screen, play and record buttons, the copy/paste bubble and a few more. And as always, email me with your requests.

When will all this new UI goodness be available anyway?

The short answer is: sometime next week. But the more you tweet my posts, digg them, etc. the faster I work so you never know so tweet/digg away!