I've been involved in web development for about 12 years now and have always been involved in the early stages and client facing aspects of the development cycle. More often than not I turned to very low-fi methods of sketching the early versions of a UI such as paper, whiteboard or Powerpoint. None of these are ideal and the early agreed upon designs seem to get lost along the way. Also it's hard to make changes to non digital mockups. Recently I've been playing around with with Balsamiq Mockups which seems to be a great quick and dirty design tool for developers, designers and those who aren't tech savvy at all.

"Mockups For Desktop allows you to work on your UI wherever you are, regardless of your Internet connection. It works on planes, at coffee shops, and wherever you like to do uninterrupted work. Import and Export features ensure seamless integration with all the other versions of Mockups, for when you get back online. Plus you can load and save multiple mockups files, use all keyboard shortcuts and lots more."

Here's a quick screencast from their site:

It quickly let's you drag, drop, layout and resize common UI elements. It purposefully makes the UI elements imperfect or look like "back of the napkin" drawings so those viewing the mock up don't get caught up with minutiae and aesthetics. I can't tell you how many UI review meetings I've seen get side tracked by details like logos, colors and pixel perfection when it's just not appropriate.

Here's a quick mock up I through together to pass to the designers for RobotReplay to try to incorporate the "cover flow" pattern into session browsing.

Don't let the simple appearance fool you though Mockups has some handy features to help you get mock ups done quickly and efficiently.

-Keyboard postions and navigation of the UI
-Smart resizing of the elements (i.e. text doesn't stretch, just the lines do)
-Smart guides to help snap UI elements into alignment
-Modern stencils for patterns like "Cover Flow", Maps and Video Players

This little app can also be used as plugin for common software development wiki tools such as Confluence or JIRA. I highly recommend this app for all development and design teams. Oh did I mention this is a great example of an RIA developer eating their own dog food? It's all built in Flex and AIR. There's a free version and commercial version for $79.99. There's a number of other licensing options the integrated version for users of systems such as Confluence. This app is the labor of love of former Adobe Engineer Giacomo "Peldi" Guilizzoni who's venturing out on his own now. Keep up the good work Peldi! Seems like sales are ramping up nicely anyway;-)

Update: Mockups just got some nice coverage on the ReadWriteWeb nice to see it breaking out of the dev blogs and into the mainstream Web 2.0 scene!

Read more from Andre Charland.