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On 06/12/2012 11:27 PM, Gregory Merchan wrote:
Whatever the case, I don't know that there's a tool to make good on-screen design easy. I know about Glade and some wireframing apps, but I still see designers drawing by hand, so I take it the tools aren't good enough yet. (Or maybe people are picking the wireframing apps that look hand-drawn?) Be it RAD or wireframing tools, they all seem to focus too much on laying out controls in dialogs and not enough on designing the core information manipulation parts of applications. It's not surprising we don't see more direct manipulation when the tools don't help make it so.
Nothing beats the immediacy of drawing by hand. It's easier to not waste time on precision in the early stages, to quickly sketch a design and to scrap it, instead of reworking it like software invites you to.
The purpose of the hand-drawn look from wireframing software is to communicate the preliminary character and to make clear it is not a screenshot, that there might be no implementation at all. It also means you don't have to make up a visual style before you can get to the real deal.
One could say there are 2 different sides to GUI-design that can be hard to combine:
Creating new/custom solutions for specific cases vsworking with a framework of already existing widgets and patterns, to stay consistent.
An authoring tool like Flash is great for the former, but does not do much, if anything, for the later. I don't know how far the capabilities of a tool like Axure reach, in this regard. What I do know is that we have neither as Free Software.
In a better world, trying (as an example) how Unity's Launcher feels like, when taking full screen height, would only require tweaking one layout file and a restart.
In a even better world, a gesture would switch Unity into layout mode, and you could change the layout right there.
-- Thorsten Wilms thorwil's design for free software: http://thorwil.wordpress.com/
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