Ask HN: Review my mockup tool: WireframeSketcher

Man, there are a lot of these "Balsamiq-esque" apps lately.<p>I've started wondering if it has anything to do with Peldi's financial transparency. People saw what a cash cow it was and decided they wanted a piece.

The tour pages are really well put together content wise; When trying to decide if a program is worth a downloading, I usually scan the screenshots page and make a quick decision based on first impressions. Comes across as easy to use but with some nice power features.<p>The landing page screenshot has been poorly resized however. I'd make that a bit bigger and prettier, and you could even go so far as adding slick little javascript tooltips to explain different tools. Could help your conversion rates maybe? Also perhaps consider using the same shiny green 'Try It Now' button on the bottom of the tour pages, instead of switching to a text link. Small grammar nitpick, 'How it works' is not a question.

The Eclipse Update system is horrid (especially when your copy of 3.3 is ancient). Nice work - it is one of the better Eclipse plug-ins I have used.<p>Some points - since you are hosting this in Eclipse, it seems that you are focusing on developers. Most graphic designers won't touch Eclipse. Also most developers once they experience another IDE (IntelliJ, for example) find it harder to return.<p>Maybe nitpicky but when I drag an object like a container or button into the screen canvas, it messes with my flow when I get an immediate edit box for the text attribute. I'd rather double-click to edit.<p>Comparing with Balsamiq, one thing that I don't like about Balsamiq is you can't yet have named groups of items (e.g. all the navigation elements). Being able to have a reusable user-defined library of custom groups - e.g. new "Edit screen for editing Foo in module X" would differentiate mockup tools from the spawn of Visio.<p>Grouping logically would be the difference between bitmap type editing and Illustrator-type editing. It would be nice to be able to have an outline tree view of elements organized in a hierarchy by UX intent.

What makes your tool better than Balsamiq Mockups?<p><a href="http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups" rel="nofollow">http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups</a>

My $0.02 - the mock up on the front page looks like someone trying to design a clunky looking desktop app from the 90's (what's more, designing something that looks like it is at least partially subverting the standard OS File Save dialog) Maybe a more 'relevant' mockup would help (e.g. something suggestive of a webapp, or something abiding by more modern Windows/OSX interface guidelines). Even some of the some of the screenshots on the feature tour page I though were a little more relevant. Or perhaps a rotating carousel or video. A/B test it :) Other than that I think the product is good, I even have a vague recollection of downloading this a while ago when I was looking for wireframers for our team to use. (We ended up not using any tool, fwiw.)

Looks good. I couldn't see anything about exporting as (say) HTML? That's one thing I really really really would pay for: I sketch, and the tool exports a basic HTML &#38; CSS template. Probably best used for what you call "Masters".

I think the Eclipse integration is a very interesting way to differentiate.<p>One nit: I'd put a space around the "&#38;" in the page title for SEO.

I was looking for this just minutes ago! Will certainly check it out.