Review: Balsamic Mockups

After writing about prototyping GUIs with Powerpoint, I was contacted by Peldi, owner of Balsamiq.com, giving me a free license of his product Balsamic Mockups, to try and if I liked, write a review about it.

I've downloaded the application (made with Adobe AIR), and made a mockup of the (now retired) Downloads section of the community.

Here is a screenshot of the interface took while I was finishing the mockup:

The app is quite intuitive to use, with toolbars and markers appearing when you select elements. Everything is drag&drop, then customize. All elements come with sample data that explains special tags or characters (for example, using "f " for closed folders and "F " for open ones in a folderview element).

Here it is the final result, and a real screenshot for quick comparison:

As you can see, it is quite similar, and I assure you didn't took more than 5 minutes to build it. Surely I could have played with sizes a bit more, but I wanted a "fast and dirt" prototype.

Prototyping with this tool is really fast and I'm surely going to use it for home projects.