[Zope] OT: Q about mockup-making software

[Jean-Francois.Doyon at CCRS.NRCan.gc.ca]

It's just a thought, and I should point out I don't do such work myself
(Though I work with people who do, but they use Dreamweaver and more complex
mockups), but ... Wouldn't PDF do all this ?

It can ingest/display raster images, have hotpots and links, ToC's with
thumbnails, etc ... Easily viewed, plenty of good tools and support
(Including, since you mentionned it OpenOffice), and so on ...

Just an idea !

J.F.

-----Original Message-----
From: zope-bounces+jean-francois.doyon=ccrs.nrcan.gc.ca at zope.org
[mailto:zope-bounces+jean-francois.doyon=ccrs.nrcan.gc.ca at zope.org]On
Behalf Of Chris McDonough
Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2004 5:28 PM
To: zope at zope.org
Subject: [Zope] OT: Q about mockup-making software


I am frequently required to make mockups in the course of developing a
project.  I am not comfortable using Dreamweaver or another WYSIWYG
tool, mostly because I really don't care about the actual HTML that will
eventually be generated, and I don't want to need to learn all of the
other stuff that comes along with Dreamweaver to do this.  I find that I
also tend to get sidetracked in making things "look nice" in
Dreamweaver, when in reality it just doesn't matter at the time when I'm
doing it.

Also, I don't even care that the resulting mockup looks much like what
it will eventually look like in HTML.  The mockup doesn't even need to
be dynamic (it needn't show the actual dropping down of dropdown boxes,
or the actual scrolling of multiselect boxes, etc).  The only dynamicism
required is a capability that would allow me to create a set of images
that could be navigated by mouse clicks, each mouse click which would
essentially just lead to another "page" which could itself be a static
image with hotspots representing clickable areas.

I have created mockups in the past by creating multiple GIFs, each
representing a page (using things like Open Office Draw and/or Visio,
saving each "page" I create to a GIF) and using an imagemap editor to
create hotspots on the each GIF that lead to another imagemap.  This
works very well, but it is tedious because I can't seem to find any
tools that allow me to do this across multiple images, retaining
imagemap state across edits, and allowing me to treat a collection of
images + imagemaps as a "project".  Additionally, I would like the tool
to be able to show me a graphical thumbnail-ish overview of all "pages",
with lines drawn between the pages representing the clicktrail.

Assuming anyone can decipher my poorly-phrased description of my problem
above, does anyone have a preferred method or tool they use to do
something like this?  I don't care about platform (if it's a Mac tool,
and it works well, I'll buy a Mac ;-)  If nothing exists, I'll create my
own.

- C



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