Comments on: Mockingbird: Cappuccino-based visual mockup tool

By: ChannelingDesign

ChannelingDesign — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 20:57:07 +0000

Loving Mockingbird on the desktop, but unfortunately, it goes into a permanent stall in Mobile Safari (iPhone 2G, OS 3.1.2).

I guess I can wait a while longer for a iPhone wireframing session, but I’d would like the app to fail gracefully on (for the moment) incompatible browsers.

By: saikatc

saikatc — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 03:02:35 +0000

Hi, one of the developers of Mockingbird here. Glad you guys have tried the product, and thanks for the feedback. Export and text formatting options are on our list of features (export is probably the next feature we’re going to work on) – we’ll be blogging/tweeting about it when they get released. Also, the background image loading times should be reduced drastically once we add in image spriting (which the Cappuccino guys are almost done implementing). And we have mostly been testing in Firefox and Safari – sorry it’s not working for you in Opera – but we will be working on cross-browser compatibility issues soon.

By: MattC

MattC — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:52:26 +0000

Very well done!!

Feels responsive, sharp, clean, easy to use. I’d rather use this than Visio. Obviously not there yet feature-wise with existing prototyping tools, but an excellent foundation and proves this can be done well inside of a web browser. Reminds me a little of OmniGraffle, which is definitely a good thing.

For a quick and dirty prototype, this isn’t far off from a reasonable tool at all. Will need more widgets and stronger widget-specific manipulations (i.e. grids -> ability to change individual row widths and column heights).

Also interesting that this has implemented a menu bar at the top (can’t remember the exact menus, but akin to File menu, Edit menu, etc in the OS). Not at all the Cappuccino/Mockingbird team’s fault or issue, but sort of illuminates the need for web-based apps to be able to grow outside of the browser chrome…… eventually….

By: timsamoff

timsamoff — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:47:39 +0000

Cool, but lack of simple text formatting options and an export function make it slightly unusable (fttb).

By: dmdevito

dmdevito — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:18:44 +0000

At first sight, Cappucino looks like GWT, but Objective-J/C inspired and using interpreted mode. Unfortunately, AFAIK, they don’t provide comparison with GWT. I would be useful.

By: kangax

kangax — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:56:40 +0000

Looks good, but what happened with Opera support? It’s barely functional there.

By: BonoboBoner

BonoboBoner — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:19:03 +0000

The duration until all background-images have been loaded is too long, but nevertheless a great application!