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Wouldn’t it be great to sit down next to your client and sketch out ideas?  Now there’s an online, user-friendly tool called Balsamiq Mockups that allows you to do that remotely.

Balsamiq Mockups helps you and your team or clients iterate on wireframes as early in the process as possible, when it’s cheapest to do so.  Not surprisingly, it was developed by a former Macromedia/Adobe software engineer.  

Balsamiq Mockups hits the bulls-eye for firms like DesignMind.  We can use this inexpensive tool to rapidly create mock-ups of both desktop and web applications.  It’s got a lot of power, and is easy to learn.  One of the really great ideas in this tool is that the prototypes look hand-drawn.  This informal appearance makes stakeholders more comfortable about giving the developers early feedback, which is so incredibly valuable.

I learned about Balsamiq Mockups last week when Don Robins spoke to the San Francisco .NET User Group.  (Don, a principal at Outformations, gave a great overview of SQL Server Compact Edition.)   

Software Application Developers have long struggled with ways to help their clients visualize what an application will look like, early in the project.  These days developers communicate their user interface designs in many ways, all the way from whiteboard sketches, Visio diagrams, Excel, and at the high end, complex software visualization systems such as iRise.

If you aren’t doing prototyping, or if you’re using the paper, Visio, or Excel approach, you can elevate your development process easily with this product.  Thanks to Don for spending some of his presentation demonstrating the Balsamiq tool.

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Earlier this month Microsoft released the first beta of a new free tool – the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit – that makes it easy to perform SEO analysis on your site and identify and fix issues within it.

Scott Guthrie’s excellent blog tells all about it.  Thanks to E.R. Gilmore at Travis Medical Software for pointing it out to me.   The new SEO Toolkit looks incredibly useful, and at DesignMind we’re starting to test it out on several client websites.  I’ll report back on its effectiveness.  I’ll also try to arrange a demo of this toolkit at an upcoming meeting of the San Francisco .NET User Group.

Scott Guthrie runs the development teams at Microsoft responsible for ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF, IIS, and various Visual Studio Tools.

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Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger touts the MicroFueler

What a week!  Today I had the chance to go to Sacramento to attend the unveiling of the E-Fuel MicroFueler on the steps of the California Capitol Building.  Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Adams, Secretary of the California EPA, were on hand to make the introductions to a crowd of several hundred.  Entrepreneur and E-Fuel founder Thomas Quinn told us how he became interested in home ethanol production, and why he thinks the Organic Fuel Revolution will change the world.

In the morning I’m heading to E-Fuel’s manufacturing facility in Paso Robles, CA.  There’s a two day workshop for the folks forming E-Fuel’s dealer network.  Representatives from all over the world will be on hand to learn how to maintain the MicroFuelers they’ll be selling.

DesignMind has been working with the E-Fuel team to develop the E-Fuel Global Network.  This network allows the company, it’s dealers, and MicroFueler owners to monitor the health, performance, and real-time status, of every MicroFueler on the planet.  Each unit is equipped with internet connectivity (wired, Wi-Fi, cellular, and satellite), a GPS, and all the telemetry needed to monitor the vital signs as well as the amount and quality of ethanol each unit produces.

At the workshop, we’ll be demonstrating the E-Fuel Global Network for the dealers who will be selling and supporting the product.  This is the culmination of a lot of work by several very talented teams.  We’ll get feedback and more good ideas, and continue to make the network even better.

For the engineers in the crowd, the E-Fuel Global Network is built using Microsoft’s .NET 3.5 Framework, and SQL Server 2008.

Here’s a video of the event with Governor Schwarzenegger, as well as a full transcript of the remarks.

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