Let’s face it, prototyping and mock-ups are a pain in the rear. I’m always looking for ways to streamline the early phases of the design process. Today I found one that is simply brilliant.

Meet GUIMags: Simple, whiteboard magnets of common UI components.

Now you can do mockups on the whiteboard with high fidelity symbols that photograph well. Instead of sketching out the entire design for each iteration, you can simply rearrange elements and erase / rewrite labels as you collaboratively work through a design. When you’re done. You can simply take a picture of the whiteboard and start coding your mockup.

You can find GuiMags here:

http://www.guimags.com/index.php

DOMAssitant 2.7 is a solid improvement to the DOMAssistant framework with a clear focus on CSS.

New functions:

• cssSelect
• AJAX
• setStyle
• setErrorHandling
• first

Other Improvements

• Dramatic Improvements to the CSS Selector performance: I personally consider CSS selectors the most important feature of a framework so the dramatic improvements really help sell me the benefits of the 2.7 release.
• Unicode Support.  This can be a really big one for a variety of reasons.  Personally, I think it should be built into all frameworks from day one (It is built into javascript after all).

You can find out more about the new release here:

http://www.robertnyman.com/2008/04/09/domassistant-27-released-better-faster-slimmer-new-features/

pi.debugger is a new debug console that acts as a graceful counterpart to firebug.  I’ve  and Firebug is an awesome tool for debugging, hands down.  Unfortunately, it is Firefox specific and has to be installed on the clients machine.

Firebug lite is great, but it is extremely limited and provides little more than a logging console.  pi.debugger sits somewhere in between.  It’s not as full featured as firebug, but it does provide the ever useful evaluation console as well as a DOM browser.

Check it out here:

http://code.google.com/p/pi-js/

And test drive it here:

http://kodfabrik.com/app/pi.debugger/

Tab Boxes are one of the most ubiquitous and popular of widgets. They pop up in everything from news sites to accounting software and for good reason. After all, tabs are one of the simplest and most efficient ways to cram more into a given block of screen real-estate than would fit otherwise.

Ajax24’s drop tabs replace the normal tab-box behavior concept with a twist. THese tabs pull blocks of content down from a tab bar to make them available and float them above the background content. (think window blinds or drawers as opposed to tabbed sheets of paper). I have a few reservations about the use of a widget with such slightly unconventional behavior. But all in all, the smooth motions of the widget and it’s novelty surely warrant exploration in more playful interfaces.

You can find the widget at

http://www.flash-free.org/en/2008/04/05/e24tabmenu-–-menu-desplegable-ajax/