Awesome tools for rapid UX prototypes – Letting you focus on the solution!

June 18th, 2009 • 3 comments Internet, agile, gtd, portal, programming, software development

Comic Life is great for creating story flows in a rough and ready way, with a little style.

Balsamiq is an excellent tool for rapidly creating purposefully low-fi wireframe mockups

Napkee enables you to import Balsamiq mockups and turn them into HTML prototypes! Lovely!

Axure is excellent for rapidly creating interactive prototypes.

Liferay Portal is a pretty awesome portlet container that, with a bit of UX (HTML, CSS and JSP) hacking, enables you to rapidly produce fully functional portals. It comes with a vast array of portlets out of the box, saving you a whole load of time.

JQueryUI is a lovely toolkit for quickly developing interactive prototypes. I’m not completely convinced by it as a production tool (heavy JS? but i could be wrong), but excellent for prototyping

Portal containers: Supporting the vision of technology-agnostic applications?

April 15th, 2009 • Internet, Java, Ruby, portal
Tags: linkedin

I’ve been looking at Liferay recently. It turns out to be a fantastic portal container. It’s core is not necessarily better than it’s closest rival JBoss Portal, but it comes with a mammoth selection of portlets out of the box. Also, with the support for the portlet standard being adopted across multiple technologies, you’re not locked into Java for new functionality – in fact, i’m currently building a portlet in Ruby. On top of that, the core system is covered (exactly how covered is unclear at the moment, but we’ll gain that awareness soon), in Selenium RC integration test scripts. Perfect! All that’s missing is an adoption of BDD stories, but that can be added.

One warning – accessibility not out of the box

Liferay’s out of the box portlets are not accessible! It’s a known issue and Liferay want the community to support them in fixing this. Seems like a reasonable request and it’s lack of focus on accessibility stems most likely out it’s origins in USA. They care less than the brits about this stuff!

Tutorials

I’ll post tutorials as i progress through my Ruby portlet development and integration.