The Portable Freeware Collection Forums

Does anyone here on the site use tools that let you draw up proposed software changes or ideas? I saw a bit about a commercial program called App Sketcher that sounds very interesting up on Softpedia so I went looking for related / similar apps.

The only free (potentially portable) one I saw was for Pencil Project, a Firefox plugin. Its also GPL'd.

But if anyone has worked with non-portable, non-freeware tools, I'd like to hear about those as well.

webfork wrote:The only free (potentially portable) one I saw was for Pencil Project, a Firefox plugin. Its also GPL'd.

Pencil is also available as a standalone application. I tested V1.2.0 before. It was not portable. I will test the latest 1.3.4 version later.

Check out DENIM by University of Washington's Human-Computer Interaction and Design.

DENIM - An Informal Tool For Early Stage Web Site and UI Design

It requires java installed and writes denim.properties and denim_err.log to AppData\Roaming\Denim

CogTool is a general purpose UI prototyping tool with a difference - it automatically evaluates your design with a predictive human performance model (a "cognitive crash dummy").

http://cogtool.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/

Download @ http://cogtool.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/use-toda ... user-guide
(http://cogtool.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/sites/de ... -setup.exe)

Java application. I quickly tested and it seems to be portable.

Software Ideas Modeler has that function. It's portable but requires .NET 3.5.

To create a mockup start the program and click Start With... -> User Interface.

Very cool -- thanks everyone for the feedback.

Old thread update:

I recently saw this in action for website development and was fairly blown away. I expect it would do some cool stuff in software design. http://www.axure.com/

I occassionally use Axure for larger projects but for simpler ones I use Pencil or Balsamiq.
There are free learning videos for Axure: http://www.axure.com/learn

If you happen to have Adobe Fireworks then it can be a good alternative for mockups.