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by adamhowell 5939 days ago
Man, there are a lot of these "Balsamiq-esque" apps lately.

I've started wondering if it has anything to do with Peldi's financial transparency. People saw what a cash cow it was and decided they wanted a piece.

3 comments

In my case I've started working on WireframeSketcher roughly at the same time Peldi did. He just was much more successful than me :). You can see that my blog posts go way back to October 2008. So WireframeSketcher didn't start as Balsamiq's copycat but it certainly looks like it now.

To give credits where it's due, the original idea came to me after seeing MockupScreens. I thought that with my Eclipse experience it would be easy to do something like this but better for Eclipse. I was looking for a side project and this one seemed like a perfect candidate to me.

mockups is not a disruptive app / service. Even if inspired by Peldi's posts, if another product can take the game up a notch, it should benefit both the founder as well as the cusotmers.
I haven't seen any Mockup-products coming out recently, care to share some links?

Personally I'm not too interested in having IDE integration so...

The way I see it there are 2 classifications. Wireframing tools and then mockup feedback tools.

Wireframing

* Mockingbird (http://gomockingbird.com) - Built on Cappuccino, best designed of the bunch

* Napkee (http://www.napkee.com/) - Flex

* Hot Gloo (http://www.hotgloo.com/) - Just a web app I believe

* Pencil Project (http://www.evolus.vn/Pencil/) - Firefox add-on

* Several more wireframing type apps...

Mockup feedback

* Mocksup (http://mocksup.com) - Make your mockups clickable (Full disclosure, I'm co-owner)

* Notable (http://www.notableapp.com/) - Mark up websites and mockups with comments

* ConceptShare (http://conceptshare.com/) - Same

* Several others that focus on just mockup feedback, not much differentiation

mockflow.com also- A collaborative one
Hi there! I maintain a Twitter list of all the tools I know of: http://twitter.com/balsamiq/wireframing-tools - I hope it helps!

Peldi