Mocks

Mocks is intended to create mockups of applications for iOS, iPad and iPhone. It is so easy to use that anyone with experience on using design tools will find it a breeze to create their first mockups.

Regrettably, though, the help documentation available (as unnecessary as it may seem) is quite poor.

The tool has a well-structure interface that responds to its workflow. In this respect, it allows working on various pages of the future application simultaneously. Moreover, it has a working area, or canvas, in the center of the window, and there are panels at both sides. One of the panels on the left holds an extensive library of objects, including icons, controls and widgets, which you can easily drag and drop on the canvas. On the right, there is the Inspector, which lets you personalize the properties of the selected object, such as color, opacity level, stroke and text style. Likewise, there is another panel that allows you to lock or hide specific objects. Luckily, the tool allows working with layers and gridlines, which favors accuracy.

Although I understand Mocks is intended to be uncomplicated, such simplicity has a price. For instance, unlike other tools I have had the opportunity to review, Mocks does not allow previewing a simulation of the application you are designing.

Unluckily, the current version of this tool does not provide backward compatibility, as projects created with previous versions are no longer supported. However, this is compensated with a new project file format that handles embedded images with more efficiency.

All in all, Mocks is ideal to preview or share ideas of what an application would look like. As it does not involve writing any type of code, it helps designers and developers focus on the visual concept more freely. Fortunately, the product is shareware and its full license is available at a very reasonable price.