Obtain free Balsamiq Mockups access for Trac developer access

[lkraav <leho@…>]

Balsamiq is a great tool and ​they're cool with open source. I think Trac core guys should go ahead and apply for a free site. User flow and design decisions need a good process to be done successfully, I think this would be a major help.

What the process should be for how the content flows in and out of there from/to contributors, who else gets access etc, I don't know if I can make a sensible proposal on my own. So opening this for discussion as well.

[Christian Boos]

Thanks for the pointer, but to me it looks like it would double the work. And half the pain is about the dynamic nature of the UI, which I don't see how a mock-up tool could help short of implementing logic also there. The other half is about the details of the CSS ;-)

Closing as invalid, as suggestions for tools or processes to help for Trac development are better suggested on the Trac-Dev mailing list…

[lkraav <leho@…>]

My thinking was if anyone wanted to produce something for discussion or production, they'd have a well known *and* widely accessible tool to do so. Here's the breakdown:

1. Core developers
   • have license-based access to a set of Trac UI design core mockups and manage their availability so everyone doesn't need to start drawing Trac basic UI all over again when they want to demonstrate their ideas for changes

2. Random contributors
   • Balsamiq provides a fully functional web-based mockup editor, that has some timer-based "demo" splashes and lacks a save functionality
   • but it DOES provide ability to export both markup code (BMML) *and* a PNG file of your sketching work session
   • now a contributor can just take any trac core UI sketch (wiki, ticket, admin, …), put stuff on top of it, change it around, whatever - then attach either the resulting PNG and/or markup file to any Trac ticket. This process even has revision control built into it, just like with a code patch, since anyone can just pick up a BMML file from the ticket, import it into their own session and do whatever with it.

Yes, "where would the initial Trac sketches come from?". Core developers like cboos, rblank, psuter etc I doubt need to waste time drawing those up, unless any of you actually enjoy it. I already have a few sketches that I could upload somewhere and over time I'm sure a decent library will come along.

If it doesn't, well I don't think anyone has lost much.

I've talked to Balsamiq about a TracPlugin (since they already have rendering plugins for other Wikis), but so far they haven't agreed to do anything for Trac specifically. Ideally, the mockup library stored on Balsamiq, both BMML files and PNG renderings, could be pulled into teo wiki pages via some API and that would be the primary access point for contributors.

Not sure if it's clear, but I'm not talking about #10012 style CSS work stuff here. Well, that alone was not #10012 original idea, but that was the lowest hanging fruit that got picked. This core mockup library would be useful when we fundamentally rethink how some existing Trac component's user interaction should work, or there's something new that wants to come along for the ride. Mockups are *so* much faster in getting ideas across compared to text-based descriptions.

Since I'm already on my with this anyway, I thought it'd be interesting to try this out.