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Comment by kissgyorgy | Hacker News Reader

My favorite tool for this is Balsamiq Wireframes: https://balsamiq.com/wireframes/

Having to write code loses the point of quick and dirty.

I think something like this can be useful to show your customers that something is a functional prototype and not a finished product.

This works if you can switch out The design as in the old "napkin look&feel" for Swing.[0]

Sadly I think "change design by switching out a theme" has long died as an idea in the web space.

[0] https://napkinlaf.sourceforge.net/

I'm asking myself if this might be a good application for a WebGL shader?

The issue with "theming to look sketched" is the same as with "hand drawn looking components" - it has to be integrated for your specific DOM or App, totally defying the purpose of "making someone understand this is a quick sketch". Because by now, it's far beyond being a sketch.

but that's the point, it's not a sketch, it's a prototype.

Consider building a calendar app. You build part of the thing, but you have not handled error conditions and edge cases, the back-end supports only a single user and you don't have authentication working.

It's enough to validate some of the flows and how UX actually works, but if you show it to a customer with the actual proper designs they will subconsciously asume that the work is finished.

If the look and feel is "this is not real" it sets their mind in a different configuration.

Exactly, I have been in too many meetings when they get shown a click dummy in the technology stack, we get the reaction, a couple of days more and it is done.

For wireframing on your phone, with hand drawn style: https://www.tinyux.app

It has a non-standard ux, since I didn't want drag-drop on a small touch screen.

Wow! Awesome!

Looks great! No iOS version?

Great, thanks for sharing.

I really like https://wireframesketcher.com/

No cloud dependencies, and a lifetime license for $99. These are becoming rarer and rarer

Sadly, the "lifetime license" only includes one year of updates.

Love Balsamiq. The style of wireframe is so useful for conveying to people that this is just a sketch and to avoid the ‘I’m not sure about the font’ questions

Absolutely love Balsamiq. So quick and easy. IIRC there used to be a post-processing tool by a 3rd party that would turn Balsamiq Mockups into code - wonder if it's still kicking around.

Edit: it was called napkee. looks like it was open sourced but hasn't been touched in almost a decade

I used Balsamiq for years and loved it.

It finally became too bloated and now we just use draw.io.

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