Still using your hand for drawing wireframes? These two online tools -MockFlow and HotGloo are ready to help you for creating UI mockups. Last week I have tested them for my company. First to say, both two application is very handy  but they have distinct contrasts on their approaches.

Here my test:

MockFlow

Pros

• Wide range of components
• Page temlates
• Various export formats (image, PDF, PPT)
• Versioning
• Real time collaboration
• Hierarchical structuring for pages and ease of binding it with components (menus etc.)

Cons

• Structural bindings are not consistent. Eg: if page name is changed, menu item doesn’t update itself
• View stack components’s (tabs, accordions) interior regions are not editable. At least I could not tackle it.
• All data is represented by comma seperated text. That is not sufficent in all cases.

HotGloo

Pros

• User type definitions (admin, user) for pages and components for customization of view
• Some interactions can be added to mouse click and initialization for firing events like showing message, changing visibility of components.
• Components have sufficient range of attributes and controls.
• Ease of creating custom components
• Layering
• Sufficient control on view stack type components

Cons

• Limited number of components
• Some processes are hard to deal with and so complex
• Export formats are inadequate
• Not offers an export solution for user defined interactions and also for view stacks. May be SWF export option is necessary.

Result

Actually results depends on your approach to wireframing. İf you are stick on details and planning deeply, try HotGloo. But if you want a tool easy and fast as hand drawing MockFlow is more suitable for you. By the way, HotGloo is on beta and free.

“Gist is a simple way to share snippets and pastes with others. All gists are git repositories, so they are automatically versioned, forkable and usable as a git repository.”

I had a chance to test flow.io, a new Project Management solution. The first thing that draws my attention was plainnes, in positive meaning. It’s very easy adapt yourself to application, if you are familiar with project management terminology. Just focus on your projects, don’t waste your time with project managent tool. I guess that’s the key concept underlying flow.io’s simple UI.

Flow.io is based on kanban, a new concept for software development but it is successfully applied on other production fields. Apart from flow.io, kanbans most significant problem is time estimation. A software development projects every single piece of work almost different than another and also that time issue depends on developers qualifications. These make harder to estimate time required to close an issue from work done. I think that’s the biggest gap of the product.

Hot Gloo is another online UI mockup application. It is now beta but promising one.