It seems like Balsamiq and mockingbird are pretty good for quickly prototyping ideas, but they aren't great at producing professional looking mockups, especially for the iphone / ipad.<p>Is there room in the market for a competitor in this space?
Keep in mind that Balsamiq prototypes look like rough sketches instead of "professional looking mockups" <i>on purpose</i>.<p>When you show a customer a mockup that is "just a sketch" (or looks like one) you can get their feedback on the layout and content.<p>When you give them a realistic looking mockup, the conversation can get bogged down in minutea like in "Can you make the background less blue? Maybe like Bob's shirt?" or "I don't like that font, can you...?" At which point you have to explain that it's only a mockup, not the actual product and politely try to steer them back to what you asked them in the first place.<p>Also, when they see a what looks like a finished product they think the work is mostly done which sets unreasonable expectations.
Keynotopia is a pretty good mockup alternative for iPhone and iPad apps. It's not an application per se, but it's a set of templates for Keynote (or PowerPoint or Open Office). You export the result as a clickable PDF which works in a variety of viewers like GoodReader.<p><a href="http://keynotopia.com/" rel="nofollow">http://keynotopia.com/</a><p>You can get pretty nice results that are somewhat interactive on the device itself.
There's always room for competition. You just need to find the right audience and pricing structure. BTW there is an iPad based app for mockups that does iPad/iPhone mockups - iMockups.