I just finished reading over a post from Six Revisions about “The Benefits of Wireframing“. It’s a great review of why taking the time to do wireframes before jumping into design mockups and development prototypes saves time, money, and headaches over the long haul. I highly recommend you take a minute to read it if you are in the process of creating a spec or writing stories for a new web app.

When we do internal projects we always take time to work up wireframes before we get into the meat of the project and it just about always ends up being a step that we look back on as beneficial to the overall project. Here are some of the tools and resources we use ourselves, hopefully they will help you on your next project.

• Balsamiq - One of the premier tools for wireframing to be released.
• Wirify - A great tool that allows you to take any site and turn it into a wireframe (or at least the foundation of a wireframe).
• Mockflow - A web-based app that offers similar functionality to Balsamiq
• The Pencil Project - An open source GUI tool.
• OmniGraffle for iPad - The iPad version of the very popular Mac software.

Other reference material:

• Ultimate Guide to Website Wireframing
• Wireframes Magazine
• I ♥ Wireframes Gallery

I have an admission to make. I’ve been a complete hypocrite about something and it’s time to come clean about it.

For years, I have spouted that having a blog for a business or project and not updating it is far worse than not having one at all. Well, as is evident from the fact that my last blog post was in the middle of November I have not been following my own advice. It may not be the biggest deal in the world, but it sticks in my belly that I’m not holding up my end of the bargain after chastising many a boss, co-worker, or client over the years for talking the talk without walking the walk.

Things change now. While it’s incredibly egocentric to think that people are concerned by whether I post my thoughts, links, or other drivel on a regular basis, I commit now to regular updates to the Flatsourcing blog. Whether it’s a quick link, an example of something we are working on, or even a silly video that caused me to chuckle, anyone visiting will be given the opportunity to get to know me (and by extension Flatsourcing) a  little bit better.

Of course, to do this, the help of the readers is going to be necessary. Let me know what you want to know about the team at Flatsourcing, about what and how we work, about anything at all. Just post a comment below or email me directly and I’ll do the best I can to provide information that you will find valuable, insightful, and hopefully entertaining as well.

Hello everybody,

While I want to thanks all our clients whose name I can’t disclose openly and project I can’t put in our portfolio
And also people behind the scene who run the company and whose stories we’ll be telling in 2011 more so that you know who to say thanks too in return

I wanted to thank:

1) Apple for inspiring me continuously by it’s facinating hardware
2) IKEA for building even nicer env around us in office
3) Then also VoodooVentures and FlatSoft for supporting it’s Flatsourcing project so diligently
4) PivotalLabs for PivotalTracker that we use for bug and features development tracking
5) GitHUB for hosting all our early and late code deliveries in our fs GitHUB account
6) Heroku and Slicehost for being our favourite hosting providers
7) All community behind RubyOnRails by 37signals, and thanks again to 38signals for Basecamp that is the tool that made us expand the communication and scope of projects dramatically!
Scrum and Agile coaches that helps us manage all the projects.

Thanks!

Oleg

Hey everybody!

Let me show you what we have in our github account for prototyping Rails applications.

Here is skeleton for Rails 3 based applications filled with:

• Basic auth: Devise app/models/user.rb
• Navigation: SimpleNavigation config/navigations
• DRY controllers: Inherited Resources
• Form builder: Formtastic config/initializers/formtastic.rb
• List builder: Tabletastic config/initializers/tabletastic.rb
• Default styles for Formtastic: Flutie
• Application config: Configatron config/config.yml
• JS Framework: Jquery-rails
• Tests: RSpec, Shoulda, RR, Cucumber, Factory Girl, Autotest
• Code metrics: rails_best_practices and rcov

We know there are a lot of other templates like Suspenders and brand new Prologue .

But we want concentrate on scaffolding and that’s is why we have a little bit customized templates for scaffold views, controllers and cucumber features.

If you intrested, please checkout Rails3 Base github repo , feel free to fork, send pull requests.

Thanks,
Timur