Dipobau Technology Blog

I’ve often wondered why there are no good tools for easily developing information architectures and producing wireframes.

Visio tends to be the standard, although I regularly use PowerPoint due to its ubiquity. Thanks to the PowerPoint Prototyping Toolkit you can produce quite good results.

The problem with Visio (other than its cost) is that it tends to get pretty fiddly/messy. Sometimes it seems that I’m spending more time fighting with the software in order to get everything laid out properly than actually designing.

The GUUUI Web Prototyping Tool is a great help, but it still doesn’t get past the fact that you’re using Visio.

“There must be something other than Visio and PowerPoint,” I’ve thought to myself as I’ve searched the web without success. I like Jumpchart but it’s designed more around content development than wireframing and prototyping.

Which is why I was so interested to learn about Oversite (thanks again to GUUUI), an application for creating IAs, wireframes, web page mockups and prototypes (for Windows/Mac/Linux).

Oversite makes it easy to create and — more importantly — manipulate an IA and display it as an attractive sitemap.

I also tested out the tool to see how easy it was to create a prototype for a web site account creation process. Laying out a multi-stage form on separate pages was easy and I could even populate the options in my select fields.

It’s far easier than Visio to link everything together and create fully functioning web pages. To test your web prototype out all you have to do is to select the “Click-thru” tab or export the whole thing to HTML.

This is the most full-featured and easy-to-use IA/wireframing/prototyping tool that I’ve come across and frankly I’m amazed that I’ve taken so long to discover it (it’s been around for 3 years).

I didn’t mean this post to turn out to be such a sales pitch, but I really like this tool. You can download the software to try it out and it’s only $35 to register it.

Original post by dennislembree@yahoo.com (Dennis E. Lembree) and software by Elliott Back

Reuters - It’s the first time songs
performed on “American Idol” have been made available for
immediate download on iTunes — and the audience’s ability to
make an instant-gratification purchase has paid off handsomely
for winner David Cook.

Original post by Reuters and software by Elliott Back

Here are 3 weird facts about Windows, that nobody can explain :

1. Nobody can create a folder named “Con”.

Try to create anywhere on your hard disk a folder called “Con” (without the quotes). Go to a location on your hard disk, right click, choose “New” and then select “Folder” from the menu that appears. Name the folder “Con” (without quotes) and hit Enter. You’ll see that the folder won’t be named “Con“. It will be “New folder”

2. A text file made with Notepad, with the following content : “Bush hid the facts” (without quotes) won’t display the actual text.

Go to Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> Notepad . Write in Notepad the following text : “Bush hid the facts” (without quotes) then Save the file and exit Notepad. Now go to the text file you created and open it. You’ll see that the text you just wrote and save won’t show.

3. Write in Word this : “=rand(200,99)” (without the quotes) and witness the magic.

Open Microsoft Word and on the first line write : “=rand(200,99)” (without the quotes)  and hit Enter. Magic in the making.

Original post by Alex and software by Elliott Back

AP - NEW YORK (AP) — David Cook’s “American Idol” win is already paying dividends on the music charts. The 25-year-old singer raked in 942,000 digital downloads in just a week, according to figures released Thursday by Nielsen SoundScan. The numbers are from the week ending Sunday.

Original post by AP and software by Elliott Back

TechWeb - InformationWeek - The new devices are smaller than the size of a thumbnail but can store more than 2,000 digital photos or up to 1,000 songs.

Original post by TechWeb and software by Elliott Back

AP - For years, Sony Corp. has been scrambling to regain its position at the leading edge of music players. Now, that scrambling has produced an egg — a $399 dancing egg that flashes, rolls and flaps its plastic flippers to the beat.

Original post by AP and software by Elliott Back

Adobe have made the new Fireworks CS4 beta download available, and the good news is anyone with Fireworks CS3 — either standalone or as part of the web suites — can take it for a spin.

1. You’ll need to have an account at Adobe and login.
2. You’ll then be directed to the download page. The downloads are 336 MB for the Win version and 633 MB for the Mac.
3. Once installed and launched, you’ll be asked for a serial number. Warning: This is NOT your current CS3 serial (which is what I tried originally). You’ll have to go to this page, enter your CS3 serial, and then you’ll be issued with a new Fireworks CS4 serial to enter into the app.

Maybe it’s just me, but when you’re told you’ll need your old serial number, and soon after an ‘Enter your serial here’ screen pops up, it seems perfectly logical to enter your old serial there — which, of course, failed and left me feeling silly.

I backtracked and figured it out, but I bet others are making similar mistakes — and flooding Adobe support. Perhaps issuing the new serial THEN offering the download would be a better process. Once the download has begun, I’d imagine most people would leave the Adobe site — sans serial number.

The first thing you notice on launch is the new interface. Adobe have gone with the monochrome icons on light charcoal. It gives everything a very cohesive look, but I found myself taking longer to locate some tools — for instance, the ‘Crop’ and ‘Export Area’ tools share a button and look very similar without the red and blue of the CS3 icons.

Adobe have also followed the growing trend of ignoring the OS chrome in favor of their own custom application interface. Apart from the fact that I can’t see any advantages to the user in doing this, it’s very much a hit and miss affair in this beta, with OS-styled dropdowns and panels mixing with Adobe tabs and dialogs. Seems more like a ‘good for Adobe’ than a ‘good for user’ decision, but I’d be happy to hear the reasoning behind it.

Anyhoo, I’ve only been poking around in it for a little while, but two really nice new features are apparent.

Improved Type Engine

Firstly, the Adobe Type Engine has been integrated into Fireworks CS4, which gives Fireworks users access to properly designed bold, italics and other font variants when they are available. Up till now, Fireworks has only offered a ‘programmatically generated’ bolding and italicization.

As the example above shows, this is better than nothing, but gives an inferior result every time.

Improved Path Editing

The other new feature I’m really enjoying is the new path editing panel. I’ve used Fireworks as an illustration tool for years because it has such a great balance of vector and pixels, but this new panel really adds some more punch to the vector editing side. Along with the standard punch/crop/unite and scale and rotate functions, the new panel adds stuff like path extrusion, path blending (my wishlist feature — thanks Alan), fisheye, deform to path, invert shape and point selection tools to the toolbox.

Although some of these tools have been available before via extensions, the new panel pulls it all together into a much more coherent working environment.

I’ll write up a more comprehensive run-down when I know more, but things are looking good at this point.

Original post by AlexW and software by Elliott Back

TechWeb - InformationWeek - The company has been beefing up its digital media offerings in order to better compete with rivals such as Apple and its iTunes music download service.

Original post by TechWeb and software by Elliott Back

AP - Sony, the company that brought you the egg-shaped music player and the dog-like robot, has now created the transparent tube speaker.

Original post by AP and software by Elliott Back

• Hundreds of New Testaments torched in Israel
  
  sort of ironic, if you think about it…

Original post by Matt and software by Elliott Back