What are you, people? On dope?

I have to hand it to Peter, the update to WireframeSketcher 1.5 is very cool.  I really like the ability to add icons inside tables, checkboxes inside lists, etc. to make the mockups even closer to the real thing that we create with RIA.  1.5 now lets you add Links, Icons, Bold, Italics, Underline, Strikeout.

The code-complete on the icons really rocks.  Well Done, Peter!

If you use Eclipse, and you do development and you’re not using Mockups, you’re missing out.  Try it out and then go buy a license.

I’m working on a project with some other team members and I have to say that WireframeSketcher really rocks! I’ve long been a proponent of drawing up the screens on a piece of paper and used drawing tools to draw my mockups. A friend of mine turned me on to balsamiq mockups. The sketches it produces are nice and look pencil drawn and all (I like the look of them — very fun), but it had a major problem:

• it wasn’t fast enough. running balsamiq as an air application was very slow — moving pictures around on my screen was painful.

wireframesketcher has

• it’s integrated into my IDE (Eclipse) — so I can bring it up fast.  I have access to SVN for sharing.  Very nice
• I really like the code complete (ctrl+space).  It brings up a fast list of components that I can scroll through and then use code complete to see what I want to include.

Some features I’d like to see:

• I like mockup’s resizing function.  I select the items, I grab the edge of the screen and drag and everything or shrinks relatively in size.  In wireframesketcher, it actually shrinks the individual elements, too.  I wish it didn’t do this.
• Custom components that we can include in the list.  If nothing but pictures.  It would be great to be able to add our own composite xml components to the mix.
• Android and iPhone components (it would be addressed if we could do custom compenents).  Maybe grab some of the pictures from:  yahoo

Btw, wireframesketcher is authored by Peter Severin.  I wonder if this is the same guy as the JasperAssistant guy?   I think it is based on this link.  Oh well, I won’t hold it against Peter.  I liked JasperAssistant for a while (we bought several licenses), but it didn’t update features as fast as I’d like.  wireframesketcher seems to be moving right along.

I was all set to update the Quantum DB plugin (source-cvs) to add a few features I wanted.

• generating insert or dbunit statements from selected rows of a result set – for inserting into a dbunit test case
• exporting a set of tables to insert statements

My needs were meager, but since I was going to be doing a lot of this (and I do on every project) it seemed useful.

I did some googling and found the DBViewer Plugin (source-svn|browse). Looks pretty sweet.