The Tools

Wireframing tools take away the looks and replace it with hurried sketches. By tools I mean anything from a napkin and thick ball pen, storyboards with post-it notes, to complex pieces of software that require prior training.

The problem with drawing websites on napkins is that you can’t easily simulate what happens when somebody clicks on a button or writes the wrong text. It is possible, but you’ll have to stress your imagination skills, which would take away a tiny, precious part of your brain.

Although nothing is as intuitive as your pen and throw-aways, the added bonus of a nearly functional sketch tips the scale for me towards software. There’s a sense of accomplishment when a project starts to make sense, and all that’s left is to dress it in silk and gold.

I had to choose one of these tools and stick to, and since this is a Balsamiq Mockups review, I’ll brief you quickly on each:

Pencil

This is a nifty Firefox addon. Pencil runs like a separate application. It’s pretty capable, but it seems to be geared towards sketching desktop applications. It’s also lacking on the that side since there’s no snapping, no grid, no easy alignment and distribution. The stencil library is ok, but it barely has more than a few Windows and Linux GUI widgets.

Denim

Denim tries to be your digital napkin. It’s just a large canvas that you’re free to draw anything on. This is great for jotting down a sitemap, a flowchart for interactions, but leaves you wanting when you want to take things a step further.

The cool thing about Denim is that you can create interactions and link multiple pages from a sitemap togther. On the other hand, I’ll need to buy a tablet if I want to make the most out of Denim. My hand drawing is ugly enough, and mouse make my drawings even worse.

MockingBird

This is my second favorite piece of software. It has a nice library of widgets that look half-done, it’s very simple to use and you don’t even need to install it. The best and worst thing about it is that it’s completely online. So there’s no need to download or install anything, but without internet, you’re stuck. You also need to register to save your projects.

Projects are useful, and it’s one of the few things missing in Balsamiq. You can link to widgets to different pages by a simple drag and drop, and once you save a project you can share with a team of collaborators.

Balsamiq Mockups

Often mistakenly called Balsamiq. It’s very similar to MockingBird. But while the latter is built entirely with JavaScript, Mockups is built on Flash, so you can use it both online and from the confines of your desktop

Like MockingBird, Balsamiq Mockups has a large library of widgets, but unlike MockingBird you can extend it, either with your own, or from Mockups To Go. Balsamiq can also import and export your designs to PNG, PDF and copy it to clipboard.

Disclosure

I chose Balsamiq Mockups. Not only because I could write a keygen for it in 10 minutes, but precisely because I didn’t need to. Balsamiq sent me a free license, one that even they can’t revoke. I felt so special, until I found out that Balsamiq give away free licenses left and right. Non-profits, bloggers and reviewers, all can get a license.

Their philosophy is: If don’t want to buy the software, you never will. You’ll pirate it, hide it from friends and family and live years of shame, but you wouldn’t spend a dime. On the other hand, if you really like the product, the company or the team behind either, you’ll probably shell out this money with a smile, even if the product is free in the first place.

Balsamiq make you like them, even if that costs them $49 in Mockups revenue.

The Greeting

Balsamiq Mockups is pretty simple. You get a white canvas with a grid, and a tabbed bar filled with icons. If you know how to drag and drop, you already are a Mockups expert.

Mockups doesn’t bother you with constant nagging about registration. It’s mostly free. You only need to register when you want to link multiple mockups, or when you want to save your work in Mockups’ native format. You can still export and import your work in the unregistered version, but that’s a hassle.

The Goodies

Most wireframing tools have a separate pane to edit widgets’ properties. Like changing the text on a button, or the colors of your widget borders. Balsamiq saves precious workspace and uses a tiny floating window that only shows when you move your mouse over a widget.

The library is extensive, and it hits that spot of looking rough, but not ugly. The collection includes almost everything under the sun: Big pie charts, navigation menus, buttons, lists, checkboxes, date and color pickers, scroll bars, tabbed windows, even iPhone controls. In addition to that, you get mark up widgets for your designs, like sticky notes, arrows and a picture to scratch out unwanted elements (I’ve used this to scratch out the EQ from the iPhone draft below).

Editing widgets is a breeze. Mockups uses plain text for most widgets to modify what they display. See for example how the iPhone menu below is generated. I didn’t have to select each menu item, go to a properties window and select how I want it to look like or what’s written in it. All I did was edit the text.

Mockups can link multiple pages together. This is an advantage over napkin drawings. You can create a fully interactive, nearly functional design to demonstrate, and get a feel of how the final project will act. Remember, Mockups are all about action and preliminary layout. At this stage, how your project looks, styling and colors are irrelevant. Most elements can be linked to other pages, as long as all pages (Mockups files) are in the same folder.

The fun begins when you’re done editing, laying out and linking pages together. That’s when you get to show off your skills and crazy ideas. Mockups’ full screen mode has a huge blue mouse cursor that’s impossible to miss, and there’s a button to hide your little comments and sticky notes.

The Badies

Let’s start off with the obvious one. Mockups is built with Flash, and Flash sucks. I know that I’m going to raise an entire crowd of “Flashists” against me, but there are only so many things you exclusively need Flash for, and applications isn’t one of them. I could partially justify it if Mockups was an online-only service and it was impossible to implement otherwise, but MockingBird proves that assumption wrong.

As for the desktop version, Flash is even a worse excuse. Nothing beats native applications, no matter how close you come. I don’t care how you build, what tools you use, but it has to look and act like everything else on my desktop. I expect the same shortcuts, the same behavior, the same dialogs and the same extensibility, especially on a Mac.

Another caveat is that Mockups’ thinks a project shouldn’t be more than a folder with a few mockup files in it. Mockups lets you create links only if the mockup files are in the same folder, and it turns a blind eye to files within subfolders. This it too simplistic an approach for large projects where things get hairy and organization is vital.

Speaking of links. I like MockingBird’s approach better than Balsamiq Mockups. Mockups makes me click on a widget, go to float properties window, then select a page from a drop down menu. It’ll be great if I could drag a page and drop it on the element to link them together. I don’t want to spend time hunting for anything in dropdown menu.

These are the biggies. The rest of the little bugs are easier to forgive. Like the useless grid that you can’t snap to. Mockups remedies that by snapping to existing objects, so you can center things and align them together. But the grid is ticking me off. If it’s there, I should be able to snap and resize my objects to it.

Keyboard navigation is only 80% where it should be. Since I’m not drawing anything, I want to be able to move through objects using a keyboard. Or navigate the widgets library. I want to use my Tab button to switch between selected elements. I add and place my widgets without having to resort to a mouse.

Conclusion

In a nutshell: Buy Balsamiq Mockups (or review it on your blog). It does exactly what you would need, and nothing more. This “nothing more” is what sold me on Mockups.

What Happened

I could of course cite excuses. Lack of time, excessive driving around the streets of Dubai, clients to keep up with, decreasing interest, or extraterrestrial captivity. But I’ll choose the less common path of admitting negligence.

I’ve never wrote for fame or fortune; that’s what my daily job is for. I’ve started Scatterism back then, before blogging was hip and it’s since been my public dump of thoughts, ideas and opinions. I’ve written with moderate activity since 2003, up until April 2008, which ended with a comment on Pidgin’s support for voice chat. Not a glamourous exit I’d say.

I have neglected this blog for longer than I care for. I’ve even reached the disparate measure of taking down the front page and redirecting to my less formal, more active and trivial Tumblr blog Scatters & Confetti.

Before I get back to blogging and restart Scatterism, I’d like to share with you a few highlights of my past couple of years in Dubai:

Conversion to Twitter

Twitter become the craze only a couple of years ago, but to me it felt noisy, scattered and nearly useless. I’ve had a few sessions with @drbaher from CloudAppers and he is the reason I’m @cubex now.

I was a little hesitant at first. Twitter seemed to me like a lost world of disconnected social activities. It’s difficult to explain to those who don’t use Twitter why they should care about who had what for lunch, and why bus stop small talk is dead because of Twitter and BlackBerries.

Then this happened and changed how I view Twitter and Twitter people: I was at a bookstore with half an hour to kill. I walk in and cluelessly start browsing books and judging covers. I send an update to Twitter that reads “I’m at a bookstore and I’d like to buy a non-fiction book for my weekend.”

Within minutes I receive a bunch of @cubex replies with recommendations to read. I’ve bought nearly all the books recommended to me on that day and not one disappointed.

It turns out that if you let Twitter people know you, they can beat Amazon, Pandora and any other service that tries to figure out who you are and what you like. Surprisingly, people usually know you better than computers. They know what you read, what you’ve read, what you like and what you would like within a very slim margin of error.

I was hooked. Twitter began to grow slowly in the Middle East, especially in Emirates, and it’s still steady. And because it didn’t pick up as quickly as elsewhere in the world, I had the opportunity of meeting most Twitter people in person and have some of the most interesting conversations.

The diversity is astonishing. I met with a biker-looking writer whose passion is Apple (the company) and Tea (the beverage). I’ve also met his wife who blogs about their traveling. They both relocated from the US and are indefinitely stuck in Dubai.

I’ve met with two brothers who left their high-paying 9-to-5 jobs and created a fusion shawarma at WildPeeta. They have quite a die-hard following on Twitter. In fact, they earned loyal customers even before they opened their restaurant, and some of their recipes are suggested by the Twitter community.

I’ve met the guys behind TEDxDubai who managed to fill an auditorium with 800 people and passionate speakers within merely two months, despite the recession, the summer vacation and the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The entire event took place without exchanging a penny or a dirham and was only announced on social networks.

I realized among the useless comments, the brain farts, and the careless angst, among all the noise, the faint hint of signal is worth watching for.

I’ve been @cubex since May 2008.

Conversion to Mac

Four years ago I purchased an Asus W3J. It perfectly fit a geek’s criteria: Not too heavy, an extra battery, a dedicated graphics card, and ooh-so-nice carbon fiber. It can still run some of 2010 games, but I’d rather keep it in storage.

My first Apple was a Macintosh Classic II, but I quit Apple when they released the G4 Cube. I kept eyeing Apple’s releases from a distance, secretly lusting after the shiny aluminum. The hardware is beautiful and the specs are impeccable; Mac OS X I wasn’t so sure of.

It didn’t matter. My goal was to buy one of those books, POP in Ubuntu and replace the default, dumbed-down OS. MacBook Pro manages to pack a punch in a 15″ shell: 2.8 GHz, 4GB of DDR3 memory, 500GB of storage, two graphic cards, and a “7-hour battery.” I pulled off five hours, and never reached the theoretical seven hours, but that’s still a huge improvement over most laptops available in the market.

To cut the story short, and leave some for a dedicated post. The keyboard on a MacBook Pro is fantastic. It earned me an average of 5-8 WPM over my record. The buttons are perfectly spread out, the key travel is short but obvious with a click, and the system is responsive enough that I don’t have to wait to see what I just typed.

MacBook Pro’s multitouch trackpad also became part of my workflow. I’ve carried a Logitech bluetooth mouse anywhere I had my laptop, and I didn’t think that a MacBook would be any different. Trackpads suck. You need to move your hand away from the keyboard to navigate, and they’re inaccurate at pointing to stuff.

MacBook’s trackpad is different. This thing is huge, and yes, size does matter. The trackpad has the same dimensions as the screen I’m working on, and swiping four fingers downwards shows all my running apps. Alt+Tab (or on OSX Cmd+Tab) is dead to me.

I gave Mac OS X a shot, queuing Ubuntu as a contingency plan. It was a little difficult to navigate with a keyboard, but as soon as you get used to it (and install either LaunchBar or QuickSilver) it’s a breeze. Nowadays, I run Ubuntu inside Parallels Desktop for development purposes, Windows (also on Parallels Desktop) for a few games like Torchlight and Diablo II. I’m slightly less satisfied than I was with Ubuntu, but then again, I can run Adobe Photoshop without having to reboot.

Events in Dubai

The first Twestival in Dubai gave away money for charity: water and auctioned a golden metro ticket which sold for a 1,000 AED (approx. $274 USD). I’ve been on Dubai’s driverless metro the second day after its opening.

I’ve spoken at BarCamp UAE about virtualization and cloud computing. At BarCamp I met the lady behind Disruptive Play who gave a lecture using Lego bricks about mapping passion. I later helped her facilitate at an event on leadership. It was pleasantly surprising to find how the next generation in this region thinks, what they love and how strongly they feel about building upwards and moving forward.

I’ve helped a little at MENA Labs, which was about change and development in Dubai. If you’ve missed it, check out the galleries and installations on the website. MENA Labs are releasing a DVD soon.

I’ve attended TEDxDubai, which was a blast. We’re looking forward to another round of TEDxDubai in 2010.

I’ve witnessed the opening and renaming of the tallest building in the world, Burj Khalifa (formerly Burj Dubai.) The fireworks were beautiful, the observatory makes you take a moment in awe, but nothing beats the stranded look on people’s faces when the renaming was announced.

I’ve participated at NaNoWriMo. Although I didn’t reach the end goal of 50,000 words, I’ve managed a decent 32,000. The novel matters, but it matters more to try. Give it a shot next year, I’m sure you’ll surprise yourself. Let those neurons grow new webs.

Finally, the most difficult event was one that lasted nearly a year. We usually don’t say the “R” word around here, mostly because it brings teeth-gritting memories, and we realize that it isn’t over yet. On the other hand, the worst seems to be behind us, and I’m glad none of my friends had to beg or stoop to unwanted levels, despite some losing their jobs.

Recession brings out the best in us, the fight or flight instinct. We get creative in managing money, and find creative ways to generate it. Corporates are now more open to trying new things, and are conscience about unnecessary expenses. They’re becoming smart investors in IT, and that’s opening many opportunities to small and medium IT companies. Do you see me grinning?

Back to Blogging

Even after proof-reading this post, I’m not entirely sure how to improve it. I guess I need to write more to shake off the pile of dust, which is the current plan of action.

I love my blog. It’s quite the listener when it wants to be. It’s also a rascal that I don’t seem to handle very well. I’m back to blogging because I enjoy it. Because my MacBook’s keyboard makes me want to write. Because I discovered OmniWriter. Becasue WordPress 2.9 can handle itself like an adult.

Most importantly, I’m back to blogging because if you find one article useful, and it helps you learn one tiny new thing, I’ll be the happiest man on earth.

Google implemented voice chat in Google Talk and packaged that implementation in a library called Jingle, which was then transformed into a proposed Jabber standard, XEP-0166. Note that Google’s libjingle is not an exact implementation of XEP-0166, it differs slightly in the way it initiates its sessions, but that’s just a minor inconvenience.

Jingle has been introduced back in 2005, and even three years later, while most messengers tried to incorporate it, most still don’t support it. That’s why I got excited when I read Ticket #34 on Pidgin’s Trac. The ticket includes a bunch of patches that link Pidgin with Farsight which already supports Google Talk and Jingle.

Now the ticket isn’t assigned to a milestone, so we won’t be seeing voice support in the next couple of Pidgin version, especially that this code is only a month old. But the ticket’s been there for a year, and somebody has decided to dedicate some time to it, and that’s always a good sign.

I’m glad that the Pidgin team decided not to re-invent the wheel, and use Farsight. Pidgin can now, without much effort, support proprietary protocols as soon as they are implemented in Farsight. Meanwhile, I can stick to Tapioca for when I absolutely need to hear a human voice.

I needed a portable Dokuwiki that I carry around on my USB stick. Not only carry-in-key-chain portable, but also cross-platform platform portable. Mac OS and most Linuxes come with PHP installed, so I can run my pocket wiki without fiddling with configuration files. The Windows version on the other hand, needs to include PHP and some extensions, which amount to about 5MB extra.

The details are explained in the README file which you’ll find in Nanostick’s package. Nanostick by itself only weighs 250KB; adding PHP and compressing it leaves us with 2.5MB.

Version 0.0.1 includes a copy of PHP 5.2.5 for convenience only. Any subsequent version will not have PHP included.

Let me know if you face any trouble with it, or if there’s anything I can do to improve it.

Here’s the source, and recompiled version linked against libcmt.lib instead of MSVCRT, so it will run on its own. Unfortunately it doubled in size, from 20KB to almost 57KB, I hope you don’t run into storage trouble.

Here’s what I’m so excited about: Even though security companies are growing like fungi in the Gulf, there isn’t much serious focus on enterprise security. The knowhow is largely imported, most of the available solutions are developed elsewhere, and it costs ridiculous amounts of money to simply close your front doors.

We’re not going into the saturated firewall, IPS/IDS market; these products cannot protect you by themselves without understanding how they work and their pros and cons. We want to make sure that data is never compromised, no matter how aggressive an attack is.

You might have heard of steganography, which is the science behind hiding information. There are many applications that can hide documents inside other documents on the computer (Steganos comes to mind), and they do a great job at it, but they are limited to digital steganography.

Here’s a simplification of how these applications work:

• Pick a binary file.
• Pick another binary file.
• Scramble second file’s bits and store among.
• Restore hidden file with password or key.

Here’s how we’re doing it:

• Pick a media file, an image for example.
• Pick a file to hide or a message to store.
• Hide file inside image.
• Print image on a $100 printer.
• Scan the image on the other receiver’s side.
• Restore hidden file with password or key.

So instead of manipulating the the bits of the media file itself, we’re manipulating the signals it sends and making them carry data inconceivable to the human senses, and sometimes even machine’s. The very same principle can work on other media files, the bigger and noisier, the better. Now we’ll be able to hide PDF files over traditional FM radio stations, or broadcast Picture-in-Picture TV channels quite literally.

I’m going to refrain from dropping some lousy April’s fool’s joke, I’ve never been a fan of “not” jokes; and unless yours is at least as good as finding water on mars, my advice is to refrain to.

The last three months, my Q1/2008, were dedicated to founding a start up. We’ve just got this little space in Dubai Airport Free Zone, a.k.a. DAFZA, and we’re going to deal mostly with IT security. We called it “The Kernel”, wish us luck.

Speaking of Dubai and IT, I’ve recently had a chance with a bunch of geeks at DemoCamp Dubai, an informal conference where four or five presenters show off their skills and projects for 15 minutes each. I believe the only other place where you’d find such a friendly crowd is at a rehab support group.

Now, to explain why Scatterism looks so plain: I’m still running WordPress 2.1, while 2.5 has been release just a few days ago. I’ve customized the database structure a little, especially that it needed to accommodate Ultimate Tag Warrior. I’m using Jotdown, which is a combination of Markdown, GeSHi, some footnote parsing code, and a bunch of preprocessing macros, all of which need some work to make sure they don’t break WordPress 2.5. In addition to all of this, my eyes are sore from looking at my current lights off/lights on theme, so I’ll stick to Simplr (thank you Scott) for a while until I redesign.

I wish I could speed things up a little bit, but Dubai is a time-eating monster, with long roads and traffic jams, and unlike every other full-time blogger, I’m neither full-time, nor am I working from home.

Thanks Q1 for helping me out. Thanks Q2, the funniest intro award goes to you. Thank you those who still have Scatterism on their feed readers.

You’ve set two of my friends free of their Dilbert’ese jobs.

You’ve made me cut down my feeds, my reads, and my emails.

You’ve been teaching me a lesson, and showing me new visions.

Goodbye 2007.

I bumped into AideRSS, a feed reader that ranks posts and stories by the number of conversations. The idea is simple: count the number of links from Technorati, del.icio.us and the likes, and convert it to a rank relative to the rest of the posts from the same blog.

It might not sound very exciting, until you hit that spot of 100+ posts a day, then you’ll appreciate having a tiny robot filtering your news and giving you the relevant stories.