Simple UI mockup with Mockingbird

By

Jaran Nilsen

– June 24, 2010Posted in: Discussion, Tools

There’s several good applications for creating UI mockups out there. You have Balsamiq which is probably one of the most famous, but the pricing has always been a barrier for me – even if it’s very reasonably priced.

I was looking around the web for a good alternative today, when I suddenly bumped into Mockingbird. Mockingbird is a free browser based UI mockup application – no flash or other plugins required. After registering an account and playing around for a bit I suddenly realized that this was in fact a quite powerful, free UI mockup  tool.

Example mockup

Although not the most advanced, Mockingbird has most of the UI components you will need and it provides a clean intuitive interface for quickly getting a draft of your new website or application up and running. In addition to providing online saving of your mockups, it also provides exporting to PDF and PNG making your mockups easy to distribute and include in presentations and documentation.

This one will definitively be easily accessible in my toolbox from now on.

What UI mockup tools do you use?

Tags: balsamiq, mockingbird, mockup, user interface

About Jaran Nilsen

I've been working as a lead developer at Integrasco AS since it's startup in 2004. My interests in software development are ranging from the lowest bit to design patterns and development methods. On a daily basis my main area of responsibility is data mining technology as well as a bit of team management. In addition to my work at Integrasco AS, I am also running an open source project called iTunes Agent over on Sourceforge, which provides non-iPod owners with a way to transfer music from iTunes to their media player.

6 Comments

1. Robert Neher

   Posted June 26, 2010 at 5:30 AM

   Hi Jaran,

   Nice finding.

   Asked the two authors about integration into Polarion ALM.

   BR
   Robert

2. Matthew C. Kriner

   Posted March 1, 2011 at 12:11 PM

   With havin so much content do you ever run into any problems of plagorism or copyright infringement? My blog has a lot of unique content I’ve either authored myself or outsourced but it seems a lot of it is popping it up all over the web without my authorization. Do you know any methods to help protect against content from being ripped off? I’d really appreciate it.

3. brinda

   Posted October 31, 2011 at 5:39 PM

   I fully recommend MockupTiger . It has better widgets and is constantly updated.

4. Jaran Nilsen

   Posted October 31, 2011 at 5:45 PM

   Thanks for the tip – looks like a good mockup tool as well!

5. Bogomil Shopov

   Posted November 9, 2011 at 5:09 PM

   I can recommend Cacoo. It’s really awesome!

6. Jaran Nilsen

   Posted November 9, 2011 at 6:26 PM

   Thanks, Bogomil.

   Looks like an interesting tool for creating diagrams. Will give it a try!