Interactive screen mockup program

[Matthew Gillen]

Jerry Feldman wrote:
> neither. I'm looking for a way that I can mock up the behavior of a
> screen, but in a more stand-alone context. If it is tied to designing a
> web interface, qt or gtk, that would be fine.  That is what I mentioned
> Bricklin's Demo. 
> 
> The problem I have is trying to do something in the product I'm working
> with where there is very limited documentation. for instance, to have a
> pulldown menu, I define an enumeration in the C++ class. I then assign
> a type value to it as well as a property value. There is a text based
> config file that ties both the property and type values to attributes
> recognized by the product. My .so can access the current value of the
> enumeration, but it cannot control it. What I want to do is to describe
> graphically what I want to do. If I were designing a web application, a
> qt (or KDE), or GTK application, or even a basic X application, I would
> have a set of widgets that I could operate with or extend. I guess I
> could do it with. But, I could describe what I want in basic text. With
> a Bricklin-style program, I can communicate with the person who is
> designing the specs who really does not know our product that well by
> saying "is this what you would like to see?", and the development
> group, in how can I get FOO to do something like this. 

If I understand what you're wanting correctly, you want some front-end to
provide generic mockups of a UI so that your specialized UI toolkit vendor can
understand what you want to see (and then presumably extend the toolkit for
your use-case).

If all that is close to what you're meaning, I would give QT's Designer tool a
whirl.  With Designer, you graphically layout the widgets, forms, buttons,
combo-boxes, etc.  Then you can "preview" the form.  All the buttons can be
pushed, the combo-boxes work, radio buttons can be turned, layout managers
will work correctly, etc, they just don't "do" anything (ie it's just a mockup
of the interface).

Then you can take screenshots of the preview, or if they have a copy of the
"designer" tool, you can just send them the .ui file (it's an XML file) and
they can bring it up and play with it.

GTK has a similar tool I think that's called Glade or something.

HTH,
Matt

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