I am about to begin working on the technical design of a new Windows app that I’m going to have developed. Part of the technical design document is going to be screen layouts. I’m not going to be coding this only by myself due to time contraints, so I need something that I can hand over to a developer to tell them what this app needs to do and what it should look like. I’ve been working with Visual Studio, but I’m finding it hard to completely spec out my screens with it. Much of the stuff I need to do involves programming in Visual Studio to get data to show up. I don’t want to get into that right now - I just want to paint the screen.
Does anyone know of another app that will help me with screen layout? I just need to be able to “paint” the components on a screen and take a screen shot into a Word document.
Hmmmm…I hadn’t thought of taking it down to a basic painter level. I guess I was hoping there was an app out there that would have standard components already (like Visual Studio does with labels, fields, listboxes, checkboxes, etc), but that you wouldn’t have to develop any code to actually draw stuff. I’ll have to take a closer look at Visio and Photoshop. Thanks.
I am about to begin working on the technical design of a new Windows app that I’m going to have developed. Part of the technical design document is going to be screen layouts. I’m not going to be coding this only by myself due to time contraints, so I need something that I can hand over to a developer to tell them what this app needs to do and what it should look like. I’ve been working with Visual Studio, but I’m finding it hard to completely spec out my screens with it. Much of the stuff I need to do involves programming in Visual Studio to get data to show up. I don’t want to get into that right now - I just want to paint the screen.
Does anyone know of another app that will help me with screen layout? I just need to be able to “paint” the components on a screen and take a screen shot into a Word document.
Thanks.
Can’t you just put labels in where the later data will be displayed, and make their titles representative data?
Such as : lblFirstDataSet, text: “This is the first representative data sample”
The advantage of using visual studio is that the look and feel of the app would be exactly like you see it. I’m not sure how familiar you are but usually you don’t have to actually program to see data? If your properties window is visible then you can typically just add what you want to see in the ‘text’ property of label, textbox, and button controls and it should show up. Go to view, properties window and see the text property.
I’m actually struggling with it a bit mostly because I want to do some non-standard stuff in the app (nested listboxes, word processing-type text editing, etc). Most of the stuff I want to do can be implemented via add-on libraries, but I’m not ready to buy those libraries yet. Perhaps I just need to throw some labels in there like the above post said in order to emulate what I want it to look like.
Oh, and I already have hand-drawn mock-up. I’m now at the point where I want to actually figure out what it’s truly going to look like on screen.
Visio is an option for programmers like others have said, but Illustrator and Photoshop are what professional “interaction designers” use to tell coders exactly what they want on the screen. Can be pretty time intensive if you don’t know the sw, which I don’t.
My only requirement is that it allow me to create the look and feel of the app without taking up too much time. If I wanted to spend oodles of time on it, then I would just use Visual Studio and spec the actual screen that will be used in development. It’s going to be a Windows app, not web-based, so I guess that’s another item.