Sketching A Webpage With Denim

Sayten241 writes "Wired is running an article about a program from UC Berkeley in which website developers can literally sketch out a webpage using a tablet. The article states that Berkley felt that since so many web-developers sketch things out on paper before they begin, why not allow them to sketch on the computer? This program is not limited to websites however. It has also been used to help MIT design a Linux Interface (click the blue parts of the image to navigate through interface)."

re: Linux interface

[Tumbleweed]

Well...at least it looks better than KDE. ;)

*just joking!*

Great, now if they could only...

[stefanlasiewski]

Great, but now I need a computer program to help read the horrible handwriting [mit.edu].

I can see this thing being very useful for writing out doctor perscriptions :)

'Let's see, this script says 30 pills of Acetpoiunasd and 10 pilos of Hydroasdhkjh'. No problem!

Prior art :)

[Kickasso]

I know of a guy who sketched his website on some A4 sheets. Then he thought "heck, this is good, why waste an effort." He simply scanned these pages, added some code for navigation and that was it.

Re:Prior art :)

[RevAaron]

There is this Mac "HTML" editor that basically did this, but streamlined it- the whole process was done on the Mac. My gf had been looking for a free HTML editor before she pirated Dreamwaver or spent all day for a while in a lab at school working on her website with the school's copy.

You were given a white, blank page to begin with. You had various tools, and it looked like a drawing program. You put text on, images, etc, drawing them. It would work well with a tablet. Then you save. You'd think the tool wouuld save all the text as regular HTML text, but nope- it exported the *entire page* as an image, making an image map out of it with the text that was supposed to be linked, etc. Really seemed laughable.

Denim seems a bit cooler- it adds gesture recognition to this. ;) (and more, it'sa joke folks)

I am pretty sure this was an old version of Freeway [softpress.com] for Classic Mac OS. There had to have been an option somewhere to have it emit HTML/images like a normal editor, or perhaps they've just upgraded it to that... But they're not out of business, and some people really like the tool so it must not be a totally crappiece.

Yay. I am so excited *sigh*

[billcopc]

So it's a Paintbrush toy with an HTML wrapper. Back in my day we called this Imageready.

Now if only it did OCR and converted lines into tables, then we'd be on to something. I can't keep track of the time wasted futzing with tables.

Motivation

[Anonymous Coward]

With art like that up on a clickable site, the art department will be motivated to come in before noon to rectify the situation. They can't stand things like that. Tell them it's the permanent art!

I found in the games industry the best way to motivate an artist is, don't wait, put "programmer-art" in there.

Penmanship

[WatertonMan]

Man. And I thought *my* handwriting was bad.

Tip to webmasters using this software. All that time you saved avoiding learning HTML, Dreamweaver or whatever you now have to invest in penmanship lessons.

Re:Now We'll Hear From All Those Coding Elitists..

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem comes when some idiot fails to do what we elitists do, namely generate documents that are not only W3C-valid HTML but can also be usefully rendered in a variety of unanticipated media.

Most "tools" for "non-techies" put out atrocious garbage like undefined codepoints (which appear to work but only if you're running Windows) and layout with no structure (so the document makes no sense unless you can render and view it in two dimensions and at a resolution and font size similar to the authors') and

Re:Now We'll Hear From All Those Coding Elitists..

[borkus]

I've long since resigned myself to cleaning up multiple nested tables, empty font tags and extraneous attributes.

However, whenever we have a pen and paper meeting with wire frames, it eventually means one of our designers has to start from scratch to create HTML. Anything that saves our designers a couple of hours in lead time, means we can get a faster prototype to the users. Also, my having an HTML artifact from the wireframes, you can always refer back to the original sketch if a more fleshed out prot

Open Prototyping

[yerdaddie]

The prototype linked [mit.edu] is part of a broader effort to get interaction designers and end-users involved in open-source style interface design. Open Prototyping [mit.edu] suggests that interaction designers release-early/release-often, but in this case sketches instead of code.

The sketches created in DENIM are intentionally informal. The rational behind this is that people are more willing to speak up and change things that they feel aren't finished. Human-Computer Interaction people like to use informal tools to try ou

Not cool - Python running on IIS

[cyb97]

CGI Error
The specified CGI application misbehaved by not returning a complete set of HTTP headers. The headers it did return are:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "c:\inetpub\wwwroot\cgi-bin\denim\download_denim. p y", line 170, in ?
(('Downloading', data.file),
File "c:\inetpub\wwwroot\cgi-bin\denim\guirlog.py", line 97, in writeToLog
f.close()
IOError: [Errno 28] No space left on device

IEEE Computer Article

[lwbecker2]

There was an IEEE Computer magazine article on this in March 2001.

It was titled: Sketching Interfaces: Toward More Human Interface Design

Go to the The IEEE Computer Society [computer.org] and search the title in the Digital Library [computer.org] if you want more info. (IEEE membership required).