> Mat has produced some excellent mock-ups in the past which really > demonstrate the power of visual communication - how do you do it Mat?! >
Richard, thanks for asking. The answer is probably disappointing (and even a touch embarrassing to confess) - there is no finesse to it; I do it laboriously in a regular drawing software (paint.net <http://www.getpaint.net/index.html>) plus the Windows copy-screen-section tool or whatever it's called (let's you select an area of the screen that is copied to the memory that I then paste into the drawing software). Then you basically work with layers. I have a few reusable elements saved but mostly it's from scratch and a matter of mastering the software and putting in the time. The thing is, I suck at coding so images are often my only chance at conveying how brilliant my ideas are. (Remarkably, it still happens that people DON'T run to implement my proposals. I suspect it's the coloration or something.) Had I known years ago that svg (scalable vector images) was more useful for these things, I would have learnt Inkscape instead. Paint .net creates, um, the other alternative. I've approached Inkscape a few times but it is just so different from what I've learned that I always give up. I know Duarte made his fish in this tool so maybe he has some pointers. You, being a better coder, might not have the same incentive to actually put in the time for drawing. But, of course, not everything needs to appear like it's an actual TW screen dump. While at it... I might just have an idea you'd be positive to support... It is something I've wanted to do for a long time for the community for exactly these reasons; so that people would be able to easily create mockups for TW ideas. I'm sure a lot of incompetent programmers, like myself, have great ideas for the development of TW but that they simply can't express. A tool like this is what I'd call "infrastructure for the TW project", i.e things that makes it easier for the community to improve TW itself. IMO we should try to prioritize these. I put up http://mockup.tiddlyspot.com/ not long ago and my intention is to fill it with "graphical TW elements", i.e mere images of elements you see in TW, e.g an image for each toolbar button, an image for the whole standard toolbar, an image with a few blank tabs, etc. This would build up a "library" of such images. The user can then select among the images and position them *on the TW* in x, y, z position. I have worked out some methods for doing this in TW that are pretty interesting. I will release a community site very soon that details some of these methods. If you're interested I could give you a preview if you send me your email address (click this post, Reply to author). Jeremy has expressed that he is interested in using TW for different notational systems (if I use the word correctly) and I'm hoping for a 2mockup-notation" in TW. Perhaps a bit like with Astrids Railroad plugin. It could use transclusions to fetch images from the image library and you could perhaps have them sequence so to play up a "film" of what happens "when a user clicks here" etc. Obviously, the idea is to simplify things so it must be much simpler than to *actually* have a button that opens a popup showing an actual element. Etc. <:-) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tiddlywiki+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to tiddlywiki@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/5b208459-26ca-4147-9525-b6f0a12791b0%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
