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Closed 10 years ago.
As the title reads, I'm looking for open source alternatives to balsamiq mockup for prototyping. Anyone knows of an equally good alternative that's open source or basically freeware.
The best available Open source mock up tool is Pencil. Its available as firefox plugin as well as stand alone.
Another solution, which I personally use is Inkscape, an open source SVG Editor. It is NOT a mock up designer, but we can use it for designing mock ups, using freely available stencil kit, like Yahoo Stencil Kit.
Mockingbird is free during beta
Firefox's pencil add-on is free forever
Take a look at Maqetta. It runs as a html5 app in your browser, so you can deploy it on your server to easily share your work with others, or you can simply start it locally and point your browser to localhost on port 50000.
On their homepage, you can test maqetta online (after registering), or download a package that contains everything needed to run it locally.
Resources:
Homepage
Repository on github
WireframeSketcher is not open-source but it's free for open-source developers. WireframeSketcher helps you quickly create wireframes, mockups and prototypes for desktop, web and mobile applications. It comes both as a standalone version and as a plug-in for Eclipse IDEs. It has some distinctive features like storyboards, components, linking and vector PDF export. Among supported IDEs are are Aptana, Flash Builder, Zend Studio and Rational Application Developer.
(source: wireframesketcher.com)
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Closed 9 years ago.
I want to make a Desktop App for Linux and I'm wondering if C#/mono is still suitable for that. Do they plan to make a wrapper for GTK 3? Or is Qyoto a better choice? Also, I'm wondering if GTK is a good idea for Ubuntu, since they plan to make their own window server. (Which will use QT if I'm not misinformed...)
Any hint is appreciated.
Is mono still suitable for a Linux Desktop Application
Yes, and a good example of this is the Banshee Media Player.
Do they plan to make a wrapper for GTK 3?
Various people from the community like me are working to make this happen. In fact, there's already a version of GTK# that binds GTK+ 3.x, it's a preview version labeled as "2.99".
Or is Qyoto a better choice?
Not sure about this. I don't know of any key app that uses this, although the binding seems to be maintained and kicking. Something tells me that there's still lots of work in progress and things to do in this area though, because Qt is C++ and it is hard to bind it from C#. But there are very recent developments to fix these issues which are very promising, such as CppSharp.
Also, I'm wondering if GTK is a good idea for Ubuntu, since they plan to make their own window server. (Which will use Qt if I'm not misinformed...)
You're misinformed. Canonical's Mir project is one level of abstraction lower than what you're thinking: it intends to replace X11, in a similar way Wayland does. And both gtk+ and Qt run on top of X11.
That being said, if you're very cautious about selecting the wrong option, you could use the XWT toolkit, which abstracts you completely from the toolkit in each platform. This way, you would just need to implement a Qt backend (for XWT) in the future in case you want to stop using GTK+ in the Linux platform.
You can use Qt or GTK on KDE or Gnome DEs, what the DE uses is irrelevant to your application because the system will have both sets of libraries available anyway. The advantage to Qt is that you have an easy migration path to other platforms.
I personally would stay away from Mono, it is still available on all major distros, but has a reputation for poor stability. It is also incomplete, and they haven't shipped a new release since December 2011... For example on the distro I use, openSUSE, it is significant that the Mono runtime and bindings are not installed by default - unlike most other big VM/interpreted languages (Python and Java for example).
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Closed 10 years ago.
Looking for a rundown of all the tools available that will allow me to develop mobile websites using the .NET stack. I'm likely going to be using MVC 4 and jQuery Mobile, but what else do I need to be thinking about as far as getting all devices compatible. Keep in mind, I'm talking about web sites, not native apps right now.
Thanks in advance.
Visual Studio is all you need to write the apps themselves. The Web Essentials VS extension is really handy with working on web related stuff, so I'd suggest taking a look at and installing it. Jquery/Jquery mobile is probably your best bet for client compatibility as far as JavaScript goes.
Now, that's all you need to MAKE the site, but for testing, you should really use actual mobile browsers. One way of course is to get your hands on an actual iOS or Android device to try out mobile safari, mobile chrome, etc. The other way is to download the SDKs and development tools for iOS and Android, which come with the iOS SDK and XCode and the Android SDK and Eclipse, respectively. You can use the emulators, which are normally used for app testing, to run the mobile browser on the fake device on your PC, which will give you a more real-world way of testing the site's look as well as touch functionality inherent in mobile browsers.
Visual Studio. Especially Visual Studio 2012, highly optimized for mobile web.
Mono Projects for support across platforms (not web app, but regular apps).
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Closed 10 years ago.
I'm working on deploying a CRM in a University, the software to deploy has to be open source.
My research lead me to SugarCRM Community Edition, however, this edition lack of reporting and seems to be really hard to tailor to specific needs.
thus, i'm considering to use vtiger.
What's your advice, regarding a mid-size project.
Do you recommand to use SugarCRM, Vtiger or another software?
If you are well versed in CSS and can tailor vTiger to look a little better, then it might be a viable solution for you.
However, I would personally highly recommend SugarCRM. It is much easier to maintain and has a much larger community. Plus, you can look into the Enhanced Search Plugin, The Kinamu Reporting tool and the Zucker reports plugin to help fulfill your needs for a reporting tool. However, they are both free. I would just download them both and check into the free plugins on sugarforge and then base my decision on your findings there.
Hope this helps!
I would also recommend sugarCRM because of the larger community and availability of third party plug ins, having worked with both i can say that sugarCRM's studio gives you a bit more flexibility. There are also many plug ins; I would recomend the ModernAqua theme to improve look and feel.
I'll give you a warning however, sugarCRM is not always nice to work with. Its code is poorly documented and maintainance is a big hastle. upgrading with custom code is still error prone through version 6.x despite what they say and changes will be overwritten by the module builder.
So in short, go with Sugar but think carefully before customizing it too much because it can be a pain to maintain.
Unlike others, I am recommending vtiger CRM. The community with vtiger isn't small and if you are a true OpenSource lover then you should definitely use vtiger as it comes with no commercial version etc.
There is a number of available modules in the exchange available at vTiger. Also, a number of mobile apps etc are available too.
CSS proficiency? I don't think that is required at all. We are using vtiger out of the box and the look and feel is as good as you need. There is MailChimp integration etc available too if you are into marketing automation.
Its better to use SugarCRM Professional Edition. In this already Report Module is in Built
Thanks
I recommend SugarCRM too. Vtiger has a much smaller community and for Sugar there are modules available for almost any scenario.
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Closed 10 years ago.
What is the best load testing tool for ASP.NET applications?
Probably WCAT as it is MS and will give you shed load of Windows based metrics. WCAT
However Jmeter (Java FOSS) is top notch Apache Jmeter
And Selenium while not strictly a stress testing tool has many other testing features. SeleniumHQ
As i say WCAT if you are MS based is probably the best but worth casting your eye over Jmeter. Selenium is a FireFox plugin and does other testing that might interest you.
I'm fond of Siege for any HTTP load testing, or of course there's the classic ab.
Visual Studio Test Edition 2010 or any of the other SKU's that give you access to those tools.
The prices have just come out in Ed Glas's blog here.
This tool also appears in Visual Studio 2008.
The loadtesting tools that come with Visual Studio come with a great set of objects for manipulating tests. The test recording is great and Fiddler2 will record test as well.
It integrates well with your favorite ASP.Net dev environment... Okay, lame joke.
The results can be stored in a database with little effort and all perfmon stats are available for selection if required.
This is the tool for ASP.Net apps and I would use it for a Java site if I had to.
It is scalable in that Visual Studio itself can generate load for 250 virtual users (enough to bring your dev machine to it's knees). You can buy the licence for extra users to really get your "distributed denial of service" on.
There is one tool here that you can give a try.
Here is a good article that I've read recently.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I just finished half of "the C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4". I wanted to find some small-scale or medium-scale opensource projects that are built on Qt 4, then I can learn something from the source code.
Could anyone recommend some projects from your experience when you start to learn Qt?
Thanks a lot.
You can try http://www.qt-apps.org/. That's Qt only rather than KDE.
For KDE you can try installing it on your Ubuntu, use it for a while, pick one application that you like and look at it's source code. You can then get that from the KDE SVN repository, compile it yourself, change it, fix bugs, submit patches etc.
But remember that KDE is not Qt. KDE uses kdelibs which are another layer built on top of Qt. Maybe the cross-platform aspect also interests you: Qt works great on Linux, Mac and Windows while KDE works great on Linux and it's in the process of being ported to Mac and Windows. There is progress there (you can get KDE applications on Windows here) but they are by far not as polished as Qt is on Windows.
I guess you can say that if you aim to learn for getting a job using Qt or want strong cross-platform support then focusing on plain Qt is better, while if you aim to develop open-source applications using Qt KDE could be the better choice.
If you are on Linux (but there are ports for win and mac too), you shoul definitely take a look at any KDE application. It uses KDE libraries, but everything is built on top of QT, so it's a good start. Especially because there is a huge number of available apps, ranging from the smallest game to the large mail client ending up with an entire desktop environment.
All is open source, freely available, well documented and you can get in touch with lots of people who can help you starting up.
I wouldn't suggest going through qt-apps.org or kde-apps.org. You can find a lot of badly written applications there.
Look at the Arora browser if you want something to learn from. It isn't that large, and the source code is nicely organized.
For small to medium Qt softwares, I recommend the site www.dprog.net
That's a community building small and medium softwares with a very high Qt code source quality,
perfect for you !
Hope it helps !
Here is an open source Qt-based project I am working on: