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

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/

I’m pleased to announce a preview release of Blueprint Layout Tool 0.4. This version marks the migration of BLT to its own site at http://www.blueprintlayouttool.com and a focus on dramatic improvements to the source view. Unfortunately, the current development version only supports Firefox, IE, Opera & Safari support will be coming soon.

Key Features:

• Improvements to style and polish of the interface
• Dramatic improvements to source view (Powered by CodePress & PHPTidy)
  • Generated Source is well formatted and polished
  • Generated Source is Syntax Highlighted
  • Generated Source is cleaned of most extraneous markup

Known Issues:

• Source View does not work in Safari and Opera
• Formatting is off in IE
• Generated source contains several Mozilla specific tags that still need to be cleaned.

I would also like to take a few moments and draw your attention to Christian Montoya’s Blueprint Constructor application. He takes a different approach to the interface and design of the Layout Tool and has created something quite useful and fun to use. We will be working together to try and achieve similar conventions between our apps.

Check out Constructor at http://lab.christianmontoya.com/construct/

You can read about his design process on his blog at http://www.christianmontoya.com/2007/12/08/construct-01-alpha/

Today I’m pleased to announce the release of SilkSprite 2.0.  Everything about SilkSprite stays the same but the decompressed file size drops by an astounding 46%.

Key Improvements

• 11% decrease in size for sprite.css
• 50% decrease in size for sprites.png

My special thanks go out to Andrew France for achieving such amazing compression of the png file.

You can find the new version here:

http://www.ajaxbestiary.com/Labs/SilkSprite/ 

Much like Google’s GWT, Microsoft’s new Volta project compiles .net assemblies into client side ajax interfaces without requiring a line of javascript.

From the press release:

You architect and build your application as a .NET client application, assigning the portions of the application that run on the server tier and client tier late in the development process. You can target either web browsers or the CLR as clients and Volta handles the complexities of tier-splitting. The compiler creates cross-browser JavaScript for the client tier, web services for the server tier, and all communication, serialization, synchronization, security, and other boilerplate code to tie the tiers together. In effect, Volta offers a best-effort experience in multiple environments without requiring tailoring of the application.

Check it out at labs.live.com/volta/

Outsource your charting to Google!  Yesterday I discussed my initial experiences with the Flot charting library.   Today, I’m going to give you a brief introduction to the excellent new Google Charting API.How it works, simply embed an image tag in your source that references the google chart API location followed by a set of parameters specifying the actual chart.  Google then renders the chart as a PNG that can be displayed in the browser.Features:

Most of us are familiar with Firebug, the powerful & straightforward debugging extension for firefox.  You may not be familiar with it’s little brother, Firebug lite.

Firebug lite is exactly as it sounds, a light-weight firebug console for any browser.  Simply include the firebug script tag in any page and you’re console.log(); operations will work on any browser (IE, Safari, Firefox & More).  What’s more, if Firebug is installed in Firefox, it logs to the full Firebug console.  You can pull up the console by hitting F12 or CTRL + SHIFT + L at any time.

Don’t want to bother with hitting F12 every time you reload?  Just attach a debug=”true” attribute to the html element (<html debug=”true”> ).

But wait, There’s more.

Firebug Lite has an even littler sibling called Firebugx.  Replace the call to firebug.js with a call to firebugx.js and you neutralize any console calls in your code without having to hunt them down or find / replace.  Something that would have saved me a whole heap of trouble with the last BLT deployment.

Download Firebug Lite at:

http://www.getfirebug.com/lite.html 

I’ve made some progress and BLT in the last week and thought it has reached a good point to release for feedback.

New Features

• Border Support
• All columns can be resized by clicking on them (even nested columns)
• All columns can be selected by clicking on them
• New Properties Panel
  • Control Border & Last attributes
  • Change ID on any div
• Improved sorting

Please post your comments below.
Get it online here:

http://www.ajaxbestiary.com/Labs/BLT2/

Known Issues:

• Interface doesn’t work well on narrow screens
• Occasional problems with sorts falling outside of the page
• Output needs dramatic cleanup
• Files need minified & optimized to improve download time & performance
• Issues remain with formatting & .png rendering on IE. I hope to address these ASAP.

This version has been tested in safari 3, FF 2 & IE 7. Please test in other browsers if possible.

What is it:

FastInit is a small JS file to create a Faster window.onload. It implements a powerful onload function queue that fires once teh dom is ready and before all images have been downloaded. Ideally, this results in a dramatic decrease in a pages initialization time.

How it Works

You any functions to the queue by using the FastInit.addOnLoad( function 1, function 2, …); function. All functions are fired in the order in which they were added to the queue. addOnLoad can be called as many times as is necessary. It fails gracefully to standard handlers if the browser doesn’t support the faster methods.

Requirements

As of version 1.4.1 the need for Prototype has been removed freeing the code for use in any project where a speedy onload method is needed.

Check it out here:

http://tetlaw.id.au/view/javascript/fastinit

I’ve posted a bug fix release to the Layout Tool.

Changes:

• Dramatic improvements to selecting
• Fixed script error for IE 7.

Known Issues:

There are still major issues with IE 7 and it doesn’t work well in IE 6 yet.  If anyone has a clue why the color of the div gets progressively darker in IE 7, I’d appreciate it.

You can testdrive the new version at:

http://www.ajaxbestiary.com/Labs/BLT2/index.htm