I have tried the approach listed in “Getting Real” by 37signals and I have great results.

The client was very happy because he can imagine his website.

Now I am considering to buy or make such nice tools :)

http://www.uistencils.com/website-stencil-kit.html

http://www.mstonerblog.com/index.php/blog/comments/return_of_the_paper_wireframes/

1. Pencil

Pencil (free) is a Firefox plugin that professes to enable you to build wireframes and prototypes. As a prototyping tool it’s quite good, allowing you to quickly put together a reasonably high fidelity mockup. However, be aware you’ll still need to produce the visual design elements for Pencil, as it relies on dragging and dropping pre-made graphical elements.

The output wireframe elements that ship with Pencil do tend to be based on the look and feel of a Windows desktop application. This really is undesirable for a web application, however you could modify this with your own page elements.

Another downside of Pencil is that its export functionality provides only a few image formats. This means that Pencil falls short of being a real interactive prototype development tool.

Balsamiq Mockups

Balsamiq Mockups (price:$US79, demo available) is an interesting product running on Adobe AIR. Its representation of the interface elements has a refreshing hand-drawn, sketch-like quality to them. This does help promote the degree of changeability of the wireframes, as they look very much like a draft. If you lack the skills to create hand-drawn sketches then Balsamiq is a useful tool, as it allows you to produce quality roughs. Balsamiq also offers a standard collection of interactive screen elements, which is helpful to start off with.

http://gomockingbird.com/ is like balsamia

https://www.jumpchart.com/ – for very simple pages- I cant find how to change the layout.

Denim

A java based.

http://dub.washington.edu:2007/denim/

Eclipse based plugin – http://wireframesketcher.com/

And a nice topic in stackoverflow http://stackoverflow.com/questions/55363/best-tools-for-creating-website-wireframes

iphone

http://iphonemockup.lkmc.ch/

After my blog post about the junior software developers I have very bright idea of how the world could get benefit from them.

When you catch a junior in mistake – let him contribute to the open source community. Not with coding. With translating. Take some open project and translate it to your native language.

Maybe after all the junior will release that he is much happier to translate than coding :)

win-win condition.

N.B. On the picture – Young coder is coding in Word.

ENTITIES = {
 'À' => 'À',
 'Á' => 'Á',
 'Â' => 'Â', (още...)

The first Rails framework was fast. then it become slow, big and the idea of convetion over configuration becomes more poisoned.

Currently to start with Rails you have to learn a lot of stuff which are added just now and is not sure how long they will stay.

Also Rails is not targeting the developers to be fast but is targeting to be the perfect framework.

The price for that is that almost a year and a half there is no new version while the they refactor it.

No goodies like scafolding, only enterprise stuff around.

That is my personal opinion on this framework.

As I like to say – you cant leave your followers without food for such long time.

The original code

<%= select(“city”,”kind”, t(:place_types).map.map!.each{|key, value| [value, key]}, {:include_blank => t(:chose), :selected => @city.kind}) %>

The bad code

t(:place_types).map.map!.each{|key, value| [value, key]}, {:include_blank => t(:chose), :selected => @city.kind})

the replacement

key_values = t(:place_types).collect{|key, value| [value.to_s, key.to_s, ]}

Rails.ouch.ouch.omg!

This article is talking on designers but I think most of the things there apply for coders also.

If you read it now and get it – you will be ok, else you will learn all those rules by own in the future.

Read the full article here…

http://www.onextrapixel.com/2010/08/18/10-questions-from-modern-web-designers-answered/comment-page-1/#comment-7981