Embedding Balsamiq in Google Wave

Peldi, I asked the same question a while back.

Your answer, while very polite, seems like a definite and resounding NO! you will not be creating a Google Wave version.

Can you confirm that as a direct answer?

Best,
Kevin

Peldi,

I've been working with Wave a lot recently and came across this demo of a new brainstorming widget. Nice little movie demo that suggests how Mockups might be embedded in this collaboration tool. If you need a Wave invite, I have an extra one.

http://wave-samples-gallery.appspot.c...

Kevin

Hi Peldi, I know you take the time to read this an appreciate our thoughts and I love the way you build balsamiq so I will take the time to write this down :).

If nothing else, use you wave-build as a marketing product and see, what happens.

But let me explain that: The problem with wave is right now, that there are so many possible ways to works with it and everybody is trying out to find the usecases that will first be adapted to this new way of working.
For me as an ux-designer wave is like a dream about to coming true: Think of the potential it will have to change the way we will work with clients and third parties collaboratively. Every Specs-doc always has a huge text-part. Balsmaiq with collaboration will be a great way to work on the mockup. But thats less than half of the process needed to get a great document that will result in the perfect app. Its all about the communication around. And thats where wave steps in: It brings collaboration, versioning, editing to the core of the feature-tree. And it does it really well.
Actually I wrote about this already but its in german http://fly.ingsparks.de/2009-08-02/go... so I will try to sum it up.
With wave I will be able to start a specs-doc, add some balsamiq-mockups right in the middle... like I would with word when copy-pasting a visio-shape in the doc. But while doing this my collegue can work on the same doc. Later on I invite my client or the designer of my team to the doc. With just one click I gave him access to the realtime collaboration of the doc. Thats so much better than email, fileserver, sharepoint, wiki!

And now lets look a step further in the future: With this kind of possibilities in wave, no one will have to use files and filesystems anymore. You dont attach a worddoc, you write it inside the wave. The same with tables (excel), pictures (photoshop online), ... all those tool: The will become part of a wave. So if there is no filesystem anymore, what do we need a operating system for? Games maybe. But if you look at the html5-canvas 3d-stuff its clear that most games will run inside the browser soon. So no files, no games, no software... all in the browser -- just like websites are already. Thats what google chrome OS will look like.
A great picture from my point of view -- but it will take some years. So for now lets stick with the advantages I wrote about above :).

But you are probably afraid to add a new branch to your development that has to be supported and maintained, right? Well if so, why not think of balsamiq-wave as a labs project (no support, no maintenance-promise, just the prototype). Wave isn't ready for business anyway... it is still growing and evolving. But we (all ux-people) need some working prototype to show, that wave is good for our work. And balsamiq would be the perfect prototype for this!

This about the Buzz you will get, being the first flashbased prototyping tool that shows a live prototype that works with wave. The blogs will love you and it will make the ical-buzz-example that 37signals blogged about back in the days look tiny ;-).

But you probably don't want to have to look at new code... -- Well I cannot talk from my own experience but I have been on a google wave hackathon with some developers and the build a working wave robot and wavelet in one weekend without having worked with wave and the wave APIs ever before...

We use Mockups in my team to design new features in our web portal, and we are also starting to use Google Wave to collaborate online (since we are physically distant and don't get to meet F2F much).

Having Mockups embedded in Wave would be just great for us!

Hey, I would like to be able to search google easier. And I like googles search engine a lot better than yahoo. After I get a search results page, either I am going to click on a link or go to the next page. It gets old having to navigate my mouse down to the tiny buttons at the bottom of the screen to go to the next page. I was wondering if it was possible to make the whole white part of the screen a button to go to the next page. A huge invisible button. Got a few other ideas...