More on Wireframing
December 22nd, 2004I received this email about my post on wireframing from a friend:
Paul, I read on your blog that you wanted to know a program for wireframing. Visio by Microsoft is the "professional standard", but there is an open source replica called Dia http://dia-installer.sourceforge.net/
I personally like the simplicity of Macromedia Fireworks. I know it isn't free, but it is easy, and the vector graphics makes it great for beginners and has a much smaller learning curve then Visio or Dia. But if you want to go open source then Dia is the way to go.
Meanwhile, I took the suggestion of one of my readers and tried Microsoft Publisher for wireframing and quickly abandoned that. Then I downloaded a free trial verion of SmartDraw, which looks very promising, not only for simple wireframing, but also as a multi-purpose tool for doing org charts, flow charts, and dozens of other types of visual charts. I'm working on my first wireframe site design and so far the tool is easy to use.
Posted in: Software for Entrepreneurs
December 30th, 2004 at 14:12 PM
I just added a post on my blog about a nice package I found for Rapid Prototyping websites with.
You can read it at http://spaces.msn.com/members/mikescott8/Blog/cns!1pIzEIjQb4EsbQ9s1K7PfyGA!163.entry
August 31st, 2005 at 04:08 AM
Dia works well, but really isn't as clean and featureful as Visio. I prefer open source, so I hope Dia grows up to what it has potential to become, although it looks like its development has staggered somewhat. Dia is nice for a free alternative though. For anybody interested, uvlug.org will be handing out a disc called "Software for Starving Students" with all kinds of free software --including Dia, Firefox, OpenOffice, and many others. The BYU UUG also distributes it, and it can be downloaded from either of our sites.
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