Do-Gooders and Other Free License Recipients...

[Guy Lunardi]

All,

While I realize that their software doesn't use any GNOME technologies,
it is still a very useful tool that I personally use often for projects.

I was wondering if anyone thought that contacting Balsamiq and asking
them to consider donating licenses to GNOME Foundation members would be
useful?
http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups

Having used their software for quite some time, I know that the projects
we used it for had a much great user experience focus during the early
development cycles because of it.

It might be a great opportunity for GNOME to increase its emphasis on
user experience. We could for example use this software as part of some
of our outreach programs (collect feedback earlier on designs).

Please let me know what you think.

Best regards,
-Guy


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[Roberto Galoppini-2]

Balsamiq would be open, maybe if this makes sense we might consider to
let people know GNOME uses their product, and get free licenses from
them. Let me know if you want me to help with this, I know the
company.

Best,

Roberto

2009/10/11 Guy Lunardi <glunardi@...>:

> All,
>
> While I realize that their software doesn't use any GNOME technologies,
> it is still a very useful tool that I personally use often for projects.
>
> I was wondering if anyone thought that contacting Balsamiq and asking
> them to consider donating licenses to GNOME Foundation members would be
> useful?
> http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups
>
> Having used their software for quite some time, I know that the projects
> we used it for had a much great user experience focus during the early
> development cycles because of it.
>
> It might be a great opportunity for GNOME to increase its emphasis on
> user experience. We could for example use this software as part of some
> of our outreach programs (collect feedback earlier on designs).
>
> Please let me know what you think.
>
> Best regards,
> -Guy

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[Guy Lunardi]

Roberto,

This would be fantastic! I am a firm believer in mockups and have been
using Balsamiq Mockups for quite some time now. I am quite happy with
their software.

Stormy suggested we reach out to the usability team to see what they
think.

To me mockups have a significant potential marketing value. Having
documentation elements early is great to convey the potential of GNOME
software.

Best regards,
-Guy

On Wed, 2009-10-14 at 17:48 +0200, Roberto Galoppini wrote:

> Balsamiq would be open, maybe if this makes sense we might consider to
> let people know GNOME uses their product, and get free licenses from
> them. Let me know if you want me to help with this, I know the
> company.
>
> Best,
>
> Roberto
>
> 2009/10/11 Guy Lunardi <glunardi@...>:
> > All,
> >
> > While I realize that their software doesn't use any GNOME technologies,
> > it is still a very useful tool that I personally use often for projects.
> >
> > I was wondering if anyone thought that contacting Balsamiq and asking
> > them to consider donating licenses to GNOME Foundation members would be
> > useful?
> > http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups
> >
> > Having used their software for quite some time, I know that the projects
> > we used it for had a much great user experience focus during the early
> > development cycles because of it.
> >
> > It might be a great opportunity for GNOME to increase its emphasis on
> > user experience. We could for example use this software as part of some
> > of our outreach programs (collect feedback earlier on designs).
> >
> > Please let me know what you think.
> >
> > Best regards,
> > -Guy

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[Hylke Bons-3]

Nothing inkscape cannot do. :)
We just need to create a base library of widgets.

I think what would be more important than the authoring software is to somehow incorporate UI design in the OSS design process.
There are fery few projects at the moment that do this. A good example of this is GIMP ( http://gimp-brainstorm.blogspot.com/ ). Many people are submitting gimp mockups with their ideas of what could be better. And it works. Many of the ideas have found their way into GIMP.

On the Moblin team, we are also looking into ways of how to make our design process more open and engage the community in different ways.

Hylke
 

On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 5:44 AM, Guy Lunardi <glunardi@...> wrote:

Roberto,

This would be fantastic! I am a firm believer in mockups and have been
using Balsamiq Mockups for quite some time now. I am quite happy with
their software.

Stormy suggested we reach out to the usability team to see what they
think.

To me mockups have a significant potential marketing value. Having
documentation elements early is great to convey the potential of GNOME
software.

Best regards,
-Guy

On Wed, 2009-10-14 at 17:48 +0200, Roberto Galoppini wrote:
> Balsamiq would be open, maybe if this makes sense we might consider to
> let people know GNOME uses their product, and get free licenses from
> them. Let me know if you want me to help with this, I know the
> company.
>
> Best,
>
> Roberto
>
> 2009/10/11 Guy Lunardi <glunardi@...>:
> > All,
> >
> > While I realize that their software doesn't use any GNOME technologies,
> > it is still a very useful tool that I personally use often for projects.
> >
> > I was wondering if anyone thought that contacting Balsamiq and asking
> > them to consider donating licenses to GNOME Foundation members would be
> > useful?
> > http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups
> >
> > Having used their software for quite some time, I know that the projects
> > we used it for had a much great user experience focus during the early
> > development cycles because of it.
> >
> > It might be a great opportunity for GNOME to increase its emphasis on
> > user experience. We could for example use this software as part of some
> > of our outreach programs (collect feedback earlier on designs).
> >
> > Please let me know what you think.
> >
> > Best regards,
> > -Guy

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[Calum Benson]

On 15 Oct 2009, at 05:44, Guy Lunardi wrote:

> Stormy suggested we reach out to the usability team to see what they
> think.

FWIW, here's the reply I sent to Guy's message to the usability list.

Cheeri,
Calum.

--
CALUM BENSON, Interaction Designer     Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum.benson@...            OpenSolaris Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             [phone]

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems


On 15 Oct 2009, at 17:10, Guy Lunardi wrote:

> Also, I understand of course that YOU do not need such a tool.  
> Inkscape and the likes can do the same. The idea is for everyone  
> else (people like myself) to generate mockups to share their ideas.

There's actually a whole bunch of tools out there for doing this sort  
of thing now... ForeUI (Java) and FlairBuilder (AIR) are another  
couple of good cross-platform ones:

<http://www.foreui.com/>
<http://www.flairbuilder.com/>

CogTool from Carnegie Mellon is a particularly interesting one -- it's  
free and open source, and it automatically evaluates your prototypes  
using a predictive human performance model.  But that, as you might  
expect, does make it a bit harder to learn and use:

<http://cogtool.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/>

(Despite apparently just being a Java + clisp app, they say it doesn't  
run on Linux and there are no plans to make it do so -- maybe that  
would be an interesting project for somebody here?)

Cheeri,
Calum.

>
> -----Embedded Message-----
> From: "Guy Lunardi" <glunardi@...> <GLunardi@...>
> To:  <marketing-list@...>
> Sent: Sun Oct 11 08:23:37 2009
> Subject: Do-Gooders and Other Free License Recipients...
> All,
>
> While I realize that their software doesn't use any GNOME  
> technologies,
> it is still a very useful tool that I personally use often for  
> projects.
>
> I was wondering if anyone thought that contacting Balsamiq and asking
> them to consider donating licenses to GNOME Foundation members would  
> be
> useful?
> http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups
>
> Having used their software for quite some time, I know that the  
> projects
> we used it for had a much great user experience focus during the early
> development cycles because of it.
>
> It might be a great opportunity for GNOME to increase its emphasis on
> user experience. We could for example use this software as part of  
> some
> of our outreach programs (collect feedback earlier on designs).
>
> Please let me know what you think.
>
> Best regards,
> -Guy
>
>
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>
> -----End of Embedded Message-----
>
> _______________________________________________
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CALUM BENSON, Interaction Designer     Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum.benson@...            OpenSolaris Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             [phone]

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems

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