Wireframes, Mockups, Prototypes – FlairBuilder

Update: Make that 1500 reasons!

Well, here we are! It’s been three weeks since my quasi-silent launch on 5th of May and I’m already on profit. Since last week the sales started to go well and last night I just passed my first $1000.

This may not be much, but it is an important milestone for me, made by the 11th license sold. In these 3 weeks I had some expenses that I just had to do, like software licenses, the Flex HTML component used for the YouTube player in the viewer and so on. The total amount, including the legal set-up taxes for my microISV, is somewhere around half of the amount, which basically sets me on profit. The moment I picked up to quit my daily job (about 1 month and half ago) isn’t the best one for the Romanian economy and software job market. But I just had to do it! I’ve put lots of energy in this project and I’m determined to put the best of me to make sure it is successful.

There are several reasons that make me confident to continue with this project and, actually, have no reasons whatsoever to think about something else. The first would be the amount of positive feedback received since the launch 3 weeks ago: emails, feature requests, reviews, a grand prize at a online projects contest. One could not think these are not sufficient reasons to continue. And, of course, the revenue made so far which is pretty satisfying for me at my first attempt of entrepreneurship.

There are lots of things that I need to do in the following weeks, lots of features to implement that will certainly keep me quite busy. Nevertheless, all these excite me enough to work hard and passionately every day. Building my own product and getting in touch directly with clients that use it successfully in their every day job, now this is a dream come true for me. What could a passionate software developer ask more from his proffessional life?

Unknown, here I come!

Shortly after the 1.5 release, here we go with another quick one and some important updates.

Trial version restriction

I have decided to introduce few restrictions into the trial version, namely a limit of at most 5 pages per project, 1 master page per project. Also, the export all snapshots feature introduced in this update will not be available during trial period.

These restrictions were introduced for a couple of reasons. The first one would be because I realized that a 30 days trial period, especially with all functionality enabled is simply too much. I simply wish people won’t forget that there is someone developing this application, working hard from morning until late in the night.

The second reason is due to some technical restrictions that forced me to take this decision. Anyway, I hope people that have installed the app for more than 2 weeks won’t mind too much about it and if they like FlairBuilder, they will consider purchasing it.

Component palette improvements

In one of the previous versions I’ve put the option to show large buttons in the component palette. Given that users were pleased with the change, I have set it to default. To change it back, choose the corresponding option from the application menu:

Due to high demand, I’ve also add categories to component palette widgets. The categories are in a combo-box on the top of the palette:

I hope that this improvements will make the application more usable. If there is anything you think it could still be improved, just let me know.

Export all snapshots

Is now possible to export all project pages as images to a given directory. Due to the fact that pages are loaded lazily, when exporting a page as an image a supplementary step is taken, so there could be some latency on this operation.

Card stack polish

Probably I should have done this from the moment I introduced the component, but, well, here you have it: The card stack now can be customized with a border and background color.

To recognize it?

Bug fixes, as usual

Last night I was in a bug squashing fever. I’ve just passed over 80 support tickets on FlairBuilder GetSatisfaction forum. Quite a interested community gathering around FlairBuilder, isn’t it?

• Bug fix: Page name ‘uniqueness restriction’ message prompted when not necessary.
• Bug fix: Tab navigator: components dropped into tab navigator were going into the first one only.
• Bug fix: Data grid empty column issue.
• Bug fix: For component that support alternative row colors, the second color was not functioning at all.

This should be all for now. A big “Thank you!” to all those that help me each day to make FlairBuilder a better application, more useful and usable.

Unknown, here I come!

I am so pleased to announce that after more than a week (you know what they say: “release often, release early” ) of hard work FlairBuilder 1.5 is released with quite a few exciting new features. Go ahead and grab it now and then come back to read all about it!

As usual I’ll start by listing what’s new and afterwards I’ll share with you some thoughts and impressions about my last week as an entrepreneur.

Conditional logic

This is something that, of course, I’m very proud of: You can now define complex conditions to be evaluated before performing an action as a consequence of a user input event. And more than that, these conditions are now based on more than one component on the page. Let me show what this means!

Take, for instance, the case where you have a combo-box with three options Action 1, 2 and 3, and a button that the user clicks to go to another page. Now, you’d want to go to a different page depending on the option selected in the combo-box, or even do different things in different cases. Let’s keep it simple for now. Here’s a screenshot with this situation.

Now, to add restrictions for each of the three “Go to another page” actions and base those restrictions to the combo-box selection, you’ll define conditions by using the little green question mark icon near the action name. Clicking it will give some more options and you’ll basically start by pointing and clicking the combo-box. After you selected the desired component, depending on its type (Combo-box, Text Input, List, Table etc.), you’ll be given the option to create expressions in the form:

<COMPONENT> <PROPERTY> <OPERATOR> <VALUE>

that is, something like in the following screenshot:

I am so excited about this (hence the 1.5 version number) and I look forward to hear how it’s working for you.

Performance improvements

I have made a little but important improvement that will make large projects easier and faster to handle: Now pages are loaded lazily, that is, a page will be loaded from the project file only if needed. It was kindda silly for me to load the whole project upfront, but you know, now FlairBuilder is facing real projects with real needs. Performance is something I want address constantly so expect more improvements coming up very soon!

Components look and feel

Since many wireframe/prototype creators have this concern of presenting something that look too polished, I have simplified the look’n’feel of some of the components, namely the Button, Button bar and Combo-box. But, I also put some more options to make it easier for you to customize them.

Productivity enhancement

I’ve added two shortcuts for a couple of existing features: Ctrl/Cmd+R for exporting a screenshot of the current page to a file, and Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+C to copy the screenshot to the system clipboard.

Also, I’ve added a handy feature that allows you to easily duplicate the selected components: Ctrl/Cmd+D from your keyboard to duplicate the current selection.

Bug fixes

There were, as usual, a bunch of them, of which I’d like to mention only a few:

• Delete/Backspace key was not working on Mac OS. Lucky me, this was first reported in review.
• An embarrassing issue with deleting pages. Thanks renekasbergen for this one, as well for all the others!

I am so lucky to have already a small community of users, some of them very enthusiastic. They really helped me a lot to make the application better and more useful. Tons of ideas and suggestions on my plate coming from them or inspired by their needs. I surely have a lot to do in the following weeks. Also, is such a pleasant feeling to see how people actually use my little app… Well, for fixing bugs, clients had on email me some of their projects files so I could track down the problems. Nevertheless, seeing your own software being useful out there is just plain awesome!

Another week as an entrepreneur

Last week has been an interesting week, so to say. I’m starting to feel the real feeling of being an entrepreneur, entirely on my own. Lots of different things to do, many aspects to take care of. It’s no easy but it’s for sure an one in a life time experience. The first baby steps!

The participation at the <dev:world> Romanian software conference got me with some “networking” that I’m quite proud of. This is something I haven’t actually anticipated at all when submitting for the conference. More about this soon!

I’ll let you now enjoy the brand new and shiny FlairBuilder 1.5!

Unknown, here I come!

One of my previous blog post made a comparison between these two paper prototyping tools, Balsamiq Mockups and iPlotz. Naturally, this raised the question about how does FlairBuilder compare with both of them.

There are two ways to address the similarities and, most of all, the differences between FlairBuilder and these two other tools. One would be to simply outline the purpose of each and then list, one by one, the main features and pointing out the differences. This is what I mainly did when writing the aforementioned comparison.

The other option would be to define the place that each tool has in the bigger picture of the entire UX design and wireframing/prototyping process. More ambitious, of course, but still more relevant, I think, since, after playing for a couple of minutes with FlairBuilder, for anyone should be obvious that FlairBuilder tries to solve a relatively different problem in a whole different manner.

Tools like Balsamic Mockups or iPlotz are tring to bring the paper on your screen. They provide you the means to sketch up something really fast and then send it over the wire to the client or to the developers team. Which is the information architecture content that is supposed to be pictured in a paper mockup/sketch? I personally tend to think that it should be pretty low level, in the sense that you will not want to spend to much time capture too many details.

Digital paper prototypes/wireframes also bring up the temptation of doing a bit more than just plain hand-drawing. People are tempted to add a bit of interactivity too, mainly in the form of page to page navigation. And this happens because of two simple reasons: prototypes are digital, thus the mind of the user is set to a different level of expectations, and secondly, as a consequence, because it’s possible. Since its release, users have pushed hard for page-to-page navigation in Balsamiq Mockups, and when it was implemented, Peldi has clearly stated that at this point he feels like this is pushing the boundaries what Mockups is meant to be. Here’s a quote of Peldi himself:

Until today Mockups was designed to only do sketches. Linking mockups together allows you to move from sketches to prototypes (albeit rudimentary ones), and in my opinion has the potential to change the nature of the application completely, so I want to thread very carefully…it’s a slippery slope. Now that you have linking I have no doubt that you will be asking for a host of other features that a good prototyping application should have, like the ability to bundle mockups into projects, the ability to export all the linked mockups into an HTML / PDF “runnable” prototype, better templating/master pages support, the ability to create sitemaps…I’m not against any of this, but I don’t want to forget that Mockups is a simple little application and I want it to stay that way. It should get the job done (FAST), stay out of your way, be inexpensive and fun to use.

Simply said, implementing the mentioned features will turn Mockups into a prototyping tool. FlairBuilder already is a prototyping tool and also an wireframing tool. You can do both wireframes and GUI prototypes with it

I will not go any further with this discussion of sketches vs. prototypes. A while ago, IxDA has hosted a very interesting discussion on this subject.

FlairBuilder prototypes are “runnable” by themselves, thus you don’t need to generate any other form of prototype, HTML or PDF. They also contain all the information regarding website/application navigation. One little step that I still have to do is to extract that information into a site map for better visualization (coming soon). Also, soon to be released updates will allow you to specify complex logic for behaviors based on the state of on page components. For instance, you’ll be able to program things like: “When clicking this button, go to page ‘Bar’ only if this combo-box selected option is ‘Foo’ and/or this check-box is selected. ” Pretty exciting, isn’t it?!

All in all, a two words conclusion might be: For paper like wireframes use Balsamiq Mockups, for interactive UI prototypes use FlairBuilder. Simple as that!

It’s been one week since FlairBuilder was first released to the public. A long week, I could say, in which lots of exciting and brand new things have happened to me: have sold the first few licenses, have received tremendous amount of positive feedback from all around the world, have won a project contest. All in all, a whole lot of new experiences that I couldn’t even dream of before.

It all started with the shy announcement on Business of Software forum. I have received great feedback from that forum in the past, starting with this line:

First, 30 second reaction: Awesomeness.

You can imagine the motivation I gained from a feedback like this. And fortunately, there were more statements like that one. I am so lucky!

Anyway, back to last week, after two days of relative calm, Wireframes Magazine made be the honor to feature FlairBuilder with an article. This started the buzz! Thursday and Friday brought about 1000 visitors each. Twitter started to buzz about FlairBuilder and lots of people showed interest in my little app.

And Friday night it happened: my first sale! Followed shortly by a second one. There are no words (at least not those that come easy) to describe the feeling of accomplishment and excitement and doubt… Did it really happened? Is it a mistake? Am I dreaming? I’ll keep you posted with numbers as I get used with the feeling. I am currently bit overwhelmed.

On Monday, I participated to this contest of entrepreneurship in Bucharest, contest organized during the conference called <dev:world>. It has been a great experience for me. It was more than I could wish as a fresh entrepreneur and start-up. I meat a lot of people, experienced entrepreneurs and Web professionals, as well as other young developers like me striving to create useful software for online market. Many interesting projects participated to the competition, such as:

• A jobs search engine called balaur.ro, ‘balaur’ being the Romanian word for ‘monster’ . It was developed by some ex-Google guys or so. Very smart and impressive.
• Symbolya – A travel experience sharing website that aims to be visual only, that is you share your impressions through little meaningful icons.
• AltCtrl – a cool price comparing FireFox plugin that aggregates product prices from several ecommerce sites in Romania.
• WiseHR – An HR software that is taking shape as I write this. Developed with ExtJS and, of course, is looking extremely cool!
• Noastra.ro, noastra being the word for ours. It is basically a triad of application targeting personal finances, health and education. Business strategy still in the process of definition. ‘ve been there!
• Nod.ro, nod being the word for knot, or node. From the brief architecture presentation some could tell that it is one of the best architecture set in place in Romanian projects.
• and few others….

The start of this week also brought a new wave of visitors, ~2200 being the record! Most probably, things will calm down to about the average of 800-1000. Still I find it quite OK, considering the fact that FlairBuilder has only one week of ‘out in the wild’ experience!

We shall see what the rest of week will bring. Unkown, here I come!

Hi, there!

Just want to let you know that with the one week anniversary comes a small release with minor bug fixes and improvements. Here they are with a brief description for each.

Selected component name is now displayed in properties panel. If more than one component is selected or you selected a group, the number of components in selection will be displayed.

Component palette may now display larger buttons with component names as labels.

DataGrid/Table columns auto-sizing algorithm has been improved.

Application auto-update mechanism (the screen you see now) has been updated. Download progress will be tracked with progress bar and release notes will be displayed in a more readable fashion.

FlairBuilder now comes with an integrated help as opposed to the online help. Choose Help/Help Contents from application menu to open the help in a different window.

Bug fix: Exported page screenshot will contain master page elements, too. Thanks to Linda Chadwick for reporting this!

I hope you’ll enjoy these enhancements as much as I do! Next on my plate: more capable behaviors. Component resizing, more mouse events, perhaps a little bit of floating objects… We shall see.

Unknown, here I come!

Hey there!

A quick post for a micro, yet exciting release: FlairBuilder 1.0.1.

Following the many cool things brought to you by the first release, there are three main improvements in this release: wireframe annotations, scrollbars support and improved viewer. Here they are one by one.

Wireframe annotations

I added a new Callout component that you can add to your wireframes and attach a comment to it. Your comments will be displayed as tooltips to those Callout components. To edit the Callout number and comment just double click it. You’ll figure out quickly what you have to input.

You can use the “Show/Hide annotations” menu entry or F4 shortcut key to toggle the visibility of Callout components. I’ll soon update the online viewer of offer the same option, too.

Scrollbars support

For components like DataGrid, TextArea or Tree, you will sometime want to communicate that users will need to scroll. Now it’s possible to show that using the new scrollbars setting in the Properties view.

Improved online wireframe viewer

There are two ways your clients can view an wireframe using the online viewer.

1. The first one is sending by email the FBP file produced with FlairBuilder, file that the intended audience can open using the big centered Open button of the online viewer: http://www.flairbuilder.com/viewer.

2. The second one is to upload the file on your own server, and then send your reviewers an URL like this:
http://www.flairbuilder.com/viewer/?url=YOUR_OWN_URL_HERE .

Currently, the safest is the first one. The second option implies that the URL should be visible to flairbuilder.com server and this is not always the case. However, I am working hard on providing more flexible options to ease the collaboration process. Trust me on this one!

As a side note, FlairBuilder just got a review from the popular Wireframes Magazine. You can read it here. Thanks Jakub Linowski!

This should be all for now.

I am most pleased to announce that FlairBuilder 1.0 is released!

Many exciting improvements got into this release. I could only mention first the most important of them: master pages support.

It is now possible to define master pages and assign them to regular pages as background. While designing a page, you’ll be able to also see the master page in the background, slightly fuzzy so you could tell the difference between what’s on the page and what on the master. However, page components will also snap against master page components as if they were on the same page. I’m sure you’ll find it very handy!

A new powerful component found its way in: CardStack. Basically, it lets you define a set of alternative views that you could browse through using the “Browse a CardStack” action attached to other components. For instance, you could create simple pagination using the Link Bar component. “Browse a CardStack” action configuration offers you plenty of options you can choose from.

To make things easier when defining actions for certain events, conditions were introduced for some events. It is obvious that when clicking on a link bar item, or a button bar item, or a tree item, chances are that you’ll want to take different actions, depending on which item was clicked. Or, on the contrary, you will care too much as you may want to consider only the index of the item. Take a look at the configuration panel for “Browse a CardStack” to see which are the options. It should be pretty obvious.

Beside these, there are plenty of fixes and improvements all over the UI. Take a look at the features page for a quick overview of the most important features. Text formating in DataGrid, List or Tree components is also something I’m very excited about.

FlairBuilder is now priced at a promotional price of only $99 USD. That is a 50% discount from the regular price of $199 USD, for the first month after this release. Purchasing a license brings you a full year of free exciting updates, great customer support (I’ll get back on this in just a moment…), and the freedom to install the application on any computer that you own.

Now, some of you may probably wonder “who is this guy and why is he trying to sell yet another prototyping tool”?
In short, I am a Self-employed person based in Bucharest, Romania. I’ve been doing software for the past 6 years. No so long, some may think. That’s true, but coming from Theoretical Physics I dived into software programming with all the passion I was capable of. I always strove to get the best out of my code. Of course, as every Java programmer starts with, by building frameworks, but lately by focusing more and more on what in the end turns out to be the most important element of the entire software development process: the user. How the user uses your software and how easy can it be used are by far the only quality criteria applicable to a piece of software. This increased my determination of doing things right (not perfect, but done right) and also got me to the point where I wanted to build a tool that helps other software creators get things done right.

So here is FlairBuilder, a tool that I’ve been developing for the past 6 months in it’s current shape and for other 6 months before that in a slightly different approach. Overall a whole year in which I set the basis for what I believe to be a very useful tool. But in the end, it’s you to decide its usefulness and it’s your needs that will drive FlairBuilder’s development from now on.

And last, but not least, I’d like to thank to those of you that have helped and supported me with valuable feedback and priceless encouragements.

From now on, there is only one direction: forward!

Update: For a comparison between Balsamiq Mockups and FlairBuilder itself, please see this post. FlairBuilder is rather different from these two tools, but still, in order to avoid any confusion I decided to write another comparison to make the differences more clear. The comparison is made against Balsamiq Mockups, but the arguments stand for iPlotz, too.

When it comes to paper prototyping made in a digital fashion, there are two tools that really stand out: Balsamiq Mockups and iPlotz. People often wonder how the two compare one to each other and since there is no comparison available I thought it would be a good idea for me to write one. So here it is.

I must say that the entire comparison is made from my perspective as a tool developer. I do also develop a tool that has many things in common with what these tools try to accomplish, so I got to the point where I am very familiar with all the tiny details of this kind of tools. Maybe most of the time people won’t even notice or bother but, nevertheless, those details may sometime make a huge difference when it comes to adoption. People that have certain expectations, set by other tools, well known and established on the market, those will feel uncomfortable when facing unexpected behaviors or incomplete features or things that simply don’t work.

I also can tell that developing a tool is one the most exciting type of software development, especially graphics tool development. But as exciting it is, it is also very challenging. Getting features done right and usable is very, very hard to do. I know that with the price of many, many nights and weekends that I’ve spent on my own FlairBuilder. Thus, all my respect and appreciation for both teams developers, for all their hard work and effort to build and deliver good software.

Balsamiq Mockups

Launched on June 19, 2008, has quickly become a very popular wireframing tool. Beside the popularity of the tool, Balsamiq also attracted lots of attention due to the openness of its founder, Giacomo ‘Peldi‘ Guilizzoni, about how the business was going on.

iPlotz

About 6 months later, “after 6 months of development”, iPlotz was launched. It started as an online wireframing tool, with basic project management features. Since then it also got down to the desktop as an AIR application.

Interestingly enough, Balsamiq Mockups started as a desktop application and very soon will go online in a SaaS version. On the contrary, iPlotz started as a web application and now also comes as a desktop application. iPlotz has some integration features between the two versions. However, I don’t know anything about what plans does Balsamiq have about their desktop/online versions integration. We shall wait and see. But for now, I have no other option but to compare only the desktop versions.

Now, lets dig in!

In order to get familiar with the applications I’ll just put in here the two short videos that briefly present them:

Working canvas, pages and master pages

As you probably have noticed from the video above, Mockups offers infinite canvas for design. Wireframes are pretty much single paged. Lately, a feature was introduced to let you link two mockups so you could simulate multi-paging. In order to define some kind of boundaries, you could use a Browser Window component or simply a rectangle as a background. Master pages may be simulated by using a background image, image that was previously designed and exported with Mockups. When importing an image into your wireframe, Mockups detects on disk modifications and reloads the image, so your changes on Master mockups will be detected on subsequent image export. Not a straightforward way to do master pages.

iPlotz wireframes are multi-paged by design, so you could define pages with specific size, assign master pages to them and so on. Pages may also be linked together as some components have the option to act as links to a web location or another page. Definitely a nice set of features.

Adding components to the stage

First thing you’ll wanna do when creating a wireframe is to add components to a/the page. Both products have a pretty comprehensive palette of components for web, desktop and iPhone applications. Still, there are some differences when it comes to palette design.

Mockups has a wide horizontal palette with large component labeled images. You could tell right away how the component looks like and if it is what you’re looking for.

There is also this Quick Add box where you can type in few letters of the component you’re looking for and Mockups will offer you several options that match your search. What’s also very nice about this Quick Add box is that subsequent search/adding will smartly position the components on the left side of the mockup, as seen in the presentation video.

iPlotz components palette is vertical, with small labeled icons for each component. While it is more traditionally positioned on the side of the working area, it definitely misses a filtering box. The only “Quick Add” feature available is double clicking a component in the palette. This will add the component to the middle of the page.

Properties editing

Balsamiq Mockups has in place editing for most of the components: buttons, text, links, tables etc., they all allow you to edit their text by double clicking them. Other property values are available for editing in a property inspector.

The property inspector has been very finely tuned up so, as much as possible, it won’t stay in your way while working. It becomes visible only when one or more components are selected. While doing anything else that doesn’t require the Property Inspector to be visible, it will nicely fade away. (Some may find the fade in/fade out a bit annoying, but overall it proved to be useful.)

At the time of this writing things are in a continuous development at iPlotz. The application is changing and improving. There may not be as many options available in the property inspector (yes, iPlotz has a similar property inspector) for some components but things are surely moving fast. Here is, for example, a component that seems pretty customizable.

On page components handling

In both applications, quite naturally, you click on the canvas and then start dragging to select one or more components. When handling the selection, both application behave pretty much the same way with two notable exceptions:

1. In iPlotz you have to click and drag one of the selected components in order to move the entire selection. I’ve seen that other apps have the same behavior (OpenOfficee, InkScape are two that I’ve tried… don’t know about others). It doesn’t quite feel natural to me but I can’t exactly explain why. In Mockups you may click and drag from anywhere inside the selection bounds. UX experts out there, share your thoughts on this little detail!

2. Resizing the selection is or, I should better say, feels a bit more “live” in Mockups. On the other hand, I just noticed that from version 1.2 to 1.5 iPlotz improved a lot on this matter. I am absolutely sure that this is an aspect that’s under active development.

Well, let me just another point that comes into my mind right now: when moving things around in Mockups, dragged selection will snap to common common position relative to the margins of other components. Being that iPlotz and Mockups are “paper” prototyping tools, not having this feature may not be so much an issue for iPlotz. However, those that are somehow used with pixel perfect positioning will be tempted to position components properly aligned one to another.

iPhone support

Apparently, Mockups has fewer components than iPlotz. And it does in fact. But on the other hand it does offer more options for those few components. For instance, the iPhone component itself may be also viewed in landscape mode. The iPhone menu has lots of customization options, not in the property inspector but rather in a custom syntax, very flexible and capable.

iPlotz has a larger set of separate components allowing you to build iPhone mockups by putting together the many piece.

Anyway, one thing that clearly makes a difference between Mockups and iPlotz is the look of the components themselves. Mockups keeps the same hand-drawn, sketchy look that is consistent with the rest of the application components. On the contrary, all iPlotz iPhone components are in fact pieces of iPhone pictures, with a very polished look. Given the fact that iPhone application do have a very common look, I’d not see this as an issue, but rather as a design difference. After all, many of the components in iPlotz have a sort of mixed look’n’feel, half sketchy, half polished with straight lines and clean coloring.

Export/Import

As for exporting the wireframe, Mockups offers you PNG export option, either to clipboard or to files. Haven’t tried this myself as these features are available only in registered version. iPlotz offers PNG, JPG and PDF export. Both applications have printing support.

Conclusion

Mockups is a bit older on the market and clearly is a bit more mature. It obviously was driven forward by the large community that adopted it as wireframing tool. iPlotz is growing and, as I said, things are moving pretty fast.

While Mockups also comes as a plugin to several other tools like Jira or Confluence or XWiki, it is pretty much a very focused product. It doesn’t try to do anything else than wireframing. Just lately it got a small but highly requested prototyping feature: linking mockups together. It seems that it was easy for them to implement but they haven’t done so until now just because they don’t want to step away from what Mockups is right now.

iPlotz, on the other hand started with a different approach. It was released as an hosted application, with all the burden that comes with: user management, user rights, collaboration, etc. It also has basic project management features. The look and feel the application itself looks much more polished, letting me know that time and effort was also invested here. Clearly, these are marketing aspects and it takes what it takes to go in one direction or another. There is clearly a trade off and a price to pay for going either way.

Soon Mockups will also have an hosted version and then both will compete on both fields. I’ll try to get back with another comparison when that happens. Until then, back to FlairBuilder hard work!