Category → HTML prototyping
Create a prototype with the HTML5 boilerplate
Heard of the HTML5 boilerplate? It’s a recent great idea by Paul Irish and Divya Manian. The basic concept is that it gives you a great head start to creating a new HTML5 website by offering a pre-filled HTML file, the right CSS setup (including taking handheld styles into account), and automatic compatibility with older browsers. That’s great for people learning HTML5, but also for more experienced people who don’t want to keep typing out the same old boilerplate code (hence the name).
When we saw this, we immediately knew it would be great for quplo, since quplo is also all about getting somewhere faster and DRY. In our case, it’s about building prototypes superfast so you can communicate about them more easily and reach the end goal – whatever that may be – faster.
So we downloaded the HTML5 boilerplate and created a prototype template with it.
How 37signals does HTML prototyping
A slide from Jason Fried's talk, "Backstage at 37signals"
Last month at UIE’s Web App Masters Tour conference in Philadelphia, Jason Fried gave a talk about 37signals‘ design process. It was a look backstage at a prominent web company and was fascinating because most of his talk went really in-depth in illustrating what a conversation between team members looks like during the design of a new screen or, in this case, redesign of something fundamental. Continue reading →
Introducing prototype templates: redesign your website with quplo
Over the past week we’ve been working on a great new feature called prototype templates. We decided to build it to solve two problems. First, when you create a new prototype, you’re faced with an empty editor, which is fine for advanced users but not great for newbies since they don’t know what to do next. Secondly, sometimes you want to create a new prototype based on one of your existing prototypes, and that involves copying and pasting a whole bunch of stuff that could be automated.
So we automated it.
Yo Dawg, I herd you like to eat your own dogfood
So we put Quplo in yo Quplo so you can prototype while u prototype.
And so we did.
Being developers, we know the difference between testing your own app and using it and there’s no other way to get that end-user experience than by taking it out for a spin. So, in the best tradition of eating your own dogfood, Rahul set off to build the Quplo marketing site with… Quplo.
The funny thing is that the current version of Quplo is actually built using an earlier version of Quplo. So Rahul is building Quplo using Quplo that was built using Quplo. Yo Dawg, time for a history lesson. Continue reading →
Why we’re not building yet another visual prototyping tool
In our last few posts, we talked about our philosophy, designing in the browser, and how we think the modern IDE sucks. These two ideas might seem unrelated, but in fact they’re essential to what we’re trying to do with Quplo: build a workspace that makes it easy to create interactive prototypes by writing code. Continue reading →
Our philosophy: design in the browser
As we mentioned in our previous post about Google’s SXSW talk, we believe in Quplo because we think there’s a market out there waiting to create prototypes in the browser. And they don’t mind rolling up their sleeves and using – drum roll - HTML to do it.
We call it designing in the browser. And we’re not the first to talk about it: numerous leading web designers and speakers, including the Google guys at SXSW, have noted that designing in the browser is an improved way of thinking compared to the traditional waterfall process of creating static screens in Photoshop and then translating all that work into HTML and CSS. Continue reading →
What Google’s SXSW talk about HTML prototyping means for quplo
At SXSW 2010, Google’s Michael Leggett and Darren Delaye gave a talk about HTML prototyping called “Prototyping Web Apps – Nobody Loves a Wireframe“. The gist of their talk was that spending a lot of time developing wireframes and extensive functional specs isn’t something they’re interested in doing, and they wanted to share their process. There are a few good summaries of the talk on the Web, but let’s list some of their major points here. Continue reading →
