Thanks to Stephan H. Wissel I learnt of Balsamiq via his site yesterday. It's one of those pieces of software you probably don't realise you need until you see it. Certainly, I didn't. Then, within minutes of seeing it, I was reaching for my wallet and am now a licensed user.

In brief it allows you quickly mock-up a website/application/whatever. Examples. This is useful on so many levels.

For starters it will definitely help working with customers to understand what they're after before I start, rather than iterating towards it after I've "finished".

Outside of work it will help me with personal projects, such as the planned re-hash of this site. Nothing major. Just moving, adding and dropping some elements from the layout to help it adapt to what it grows in to (the recent articles section needs to go!). Here's the mockup I have so far.

Looks a lot like it does now, but this is where I plan to take a "helicopter view" and start working on it.

As well as exporting PNGs like the one above you can save/export the BMML files (XML) which describe the mockup. Here's the file for the above layout. There are lots of BMML files available for inspiration.

If your client had the software you could send them the file, have them add annotations and return it for further tweaks. Although this will be easier soon when they release an online version.

Using With Flex

You can even export the layout to Flex code and import straight in to Flex Builder. Although at first glance this is like saying you can write and export HTML from Word. You can but it's very messy. The Flex generation seems to just use absolutely-positioned canvases for everything. You'd probably spend longer tidying it up than creating from scratch!