Review: Briefs makes iOS app design easy and stress-free
Prototypes are important for all sorts of endeavors that pit a creative component against technical requirements—including, of course, software development. Before full-blown development starts, simplified models of a product help insure that all the parties involved are on the same page from the very outset, instead of finding out many months—and dollars—later that everybody was running in a different direction.
The makers of Briefs have found some excellent creative ways to make their Mac app work well alongside its iOS counterpart.
Briefs (Mac App Store link), from MartianCraft, aims at bringing powerful and easy-to-use prototyping techniques to iOS. It allows designers to build dynamic models of their apps that can be tested directly on a mobile device without the direct involvement of a developer.
Three years in the making
If the name “Briefs” rings a bell, it’s because its history is as colorful and picturesque as its feature set. Originally demoed at the 2009 C4 Conference in Chicago, it was initially meant to run entirely inside iOS, allowing users to create working mockups of apps directly on their mobile devices.
After nearly three years—and, apparently, much interaction with Apple’s App Store review folks—the final version of the app is split in two separate programs: Briefs proper, which runs on OS X and is where most of the design work takes place, and Briefscase, which runs on iOS devices and “plays back” the mockups created by its desktop-based cousin.
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