As I’ve been involved with different mobile projects recently, I’ve run up against some obstacles. It is difficult to design on a desktop screen when the app/site will be used on a mobile device. You MUST preview your design on the device it will be viewed on. This can be a bit of a hassle, sending images to to the device for previewing. Also, interaction is extremely important on mobile devices. We have found that our interactions, when implemented, aren’t as brilliant as we thought they would be when we were working in Photoshop. Unfortunately, so far, the only way to test our designs was to wait until they were marked up.
Yesterday, I discovered a builder called TAP which enables you to use Adobe Fireworks to create interactive prototypes for mobile devices. I’ve recently started using Fireworks over Photoshop for web design because it has tools better suited for web design tasks, allows you to create interactive prototypes and even make pixel perfect designs. It has been great. I was really hoping I could take advantage of these tools to develop prototypes for mobile without having to mark up the designs. However, the HTML export doesn’t display well on a mobile device without some significant tweaking of the HTML, which isn’t ideal for developing prototypes quickly. TAP not only facilitates rapid prototyping, in my opinion, goes above and beyond. TAP supports sliding animations which replicate animations you see on many native apps. It also supports gestures, like swiping. I have tested it on iOS and Android and it works great! I’m surprised I haven’t seen this tool around yet. Go to their website and read more about it: http://unitid.nl/2011/03/touch-application-prototypes-tap-for-iphone-and-ipad-using-adobe-fireworks/
