Inspirational Technology

Drawing User Interfaces

Robert Scoble is using an app that allows you to create user interfaces with a Tablet PC as an example of what's good about the tablet.

My first thought about this is that it's a useless idea because there's no precision in hand drawing an interface. You'll basically end up with an interface that doesn't line up right and forces you to use an interface builder anyway to put things in the proper place. You also still need to use the standard tools to set other attributes about the interface. However, thinking about this more I suppose it could be useful if you can define enough gestures to control alignments and spacing and such. Maybe using different colors to indicate different elements of the design (no idea if that's technically possible). For instance sketching the interface in black, then in blue drawing alignment lines then in red drawing pixel offsets between controls, yellow for relative control placement control. Your sketch would be kind of messy, but could be kind of cool for creating the first pass at an interface or for an interface for an app you don't really care about. I doubt it will make a good product, but it certainly would be an interesting research effort.

I've never looked at the Tablet PC APIs so I wonder if you can use colors in ink to control things like this.