Friday, May 29, 2009

WireframeSketcher

One of the eclipse plug-ins I ran into recently is really pretty impressive. I have used Viso to do user interface mock-ups before - but there are kind of two problems with this approach:

  • the result looks like a real application; so if you show it to a customer they want to stop talking to you and run the application
  • the Viso templates only provide a Windows XP appearance which is pretty lame these days

It turns out that the Viso templates were "removed" from the latest copy of Viso (along with a bunch of other useful things) and held ransom as part of a Professional Edition.

So I went off to look .... and found something better :-)



WireframeSketcher - http://wireframesketcher.com/

This is an eclipse plug-in, it is beautifully written, and very fast to quickly slam together a ui mock up.

And even better the result looks like a ui mock up; allowing every one to stay focused on the workflow; the trade offs; and how the user interface functions rather than get distracted by the font used or the icons.

Perfect.

Here is an example mock-ups done for the uDig style editor.



Stay tuned (or jump on the mailing list) for styling plans.

I have added a page on WireframeSketcher to the udig list of recommended tools in our wiki.

We keep a list of good design ideas on our wiki; in order to refine the ideas before implementation, this tool should be helpful in those discussions.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Google Summer of Code 2009

This is the first week of the Google Summer of Code - an event uDig is once again pleased to take part in. This year we have two fascinating projects:
  • Web Map Tiles for uDig - Tobias Sauerwein is going to go beyond the WMS-C support uDig currently enjoys and branch out to tile server implementations. Check the above link for details.

  • netCDF - Andrea Antonell is tackling one of the most expressive raster formats known. This project should produce both wonderful visuals; and some interesting user interface design challenges.
Check back weekly for updates on both these projects.

Monday, May 25, 2009

uDIg 1.2-M4 Released

Another 1.2 milestone release for your testing pleasure. This release includes lots of fixes for WMS-C support. WMS and WFS support has been heavily tested against the Australian SLIP data services.

This release of uDig can be found in the usual location:
Unstable Downloads

The SLIP portal has been featured on our data wiki page for some time. Once you have signed up you are sent a user name and password which you can enter when connecting to their data services.



I would also like to thank OpenGeo for the excellent WMS-C tile server "sigma". Sigma is listed in the "Web" view of the main uDig application if you would like to try it out.

Here is what the two data services look like together: