So, in 2008 our CEO, Piotr Duszynski, and Wojciech Skowronek, our lead programmer, knuckled down and started building JustProto. Around nine months later at the TriCity BarCamp on January 28, 2009, DeSmart gave birth to a happy, healthy baby app that we named JustProto. We brought JustProto into the world to help ourselves and others like us - and we hope it can help you too!
Lucy In The Sky, With Wireframes
The first thing we knew we needed to do was put it “in the cloud” as the kids say these days. Too many of today’s wireframe tools are either dedicated desktop applications or exist as afterthoughts, glommed on to graphing and mapping tools. Wire framing is crucial enough to the development process that it deserves a serious online solution, and that’s what we think (and hope!) we’ve provided.We also thought that if we were going to stuff it into a cloud then we should go the extra mile and make sure that it was fully, wholly collaborative. So, our roadmap from day one was to build for collaboration and continuously roll out features that support this philosophy. That’s why JustProto includes so many features intended to streamline workflow across the room or across the globe.
With JustProto, you can wire frame interactively in real-time with other designers and developers, who have full access to edit whatever they want, and you can chat with one another in the application, leaving a record of what you talked about for future reference. You can then share out totally functional previews to clients to review, allowing them to experience the wireframe as you intend it. No more asking people to install custom software or emailing around exported files. With JustProto, the entire world is only a link away from your prototype at any time.
We’re Developers Too, So We Know What You Need (And Don’t)
Too many tools out there seem to push you toward their way of doing things. We wanted to make JustProto the perfect vehicle for any wireframing methodology. No more locking you in to a single approach - whether it’s providing you with only cartoony sketch elements or limiting you to nuts-and-bolts vector based wireframes. We decided to include standard web elements and hundreds of common icons, as well as a file manager allowing you to upload your own. Then we made it so you can build your prototype as either a bare bones , black and white wireframe or a largely functional, graphically rich prototype designed that mimics the final product. Images, video, browser elements, mobile app elements - you name it, JustProto lets you upload, customize and turn out whatever kind of wireframe you want.Of course, because we’re developers too, we know how it is doing the same thing over and over. So, we made sure that you could create your own components and include as many of them as you want on any prototype page you need them on. You can also go back and access your image library any time you want to re-use existing graphics and you can copy and paste from page to page and into components as well.
Just because we’re developers doesn’t mean we don’t understand how important a good UI is, though. That’s why we made JustProto a drag and drop product. From the second your project loads, you can start dragging and dropping new elements and resizing them by grabbing the corners and sides. If you need a greater level of control, you can also edit common HTML properties for each element - like style, height, width, border, target and so on. And you have tons of built-in elements to choose from, elements that mimic real behavior like multiple selects, form buttons and dropdown menus.
That’s the great thing about JustProto, it’s built by developers who understand that you want to get things done. Sometimes you just need to knock out a basic mockup and sometimes you need to prototype an entire mobile application from stem to stern. JustProto recognizes that one size does not fit all, so it gives you a great set of tools to use to get started and the ability to customize and manage detail when you need it.