Napkee: Interview with Enrico

In my previous post, I presented my thoughts about Napkee. In this post I’ll present a Q & A style interview with Enrico Berti, the founder/creator/coder of Napkee, who was more than happy to provide some great information. Enjoy…

How does Napkee stay in sync with Mockups? Is there a communication channel there or do you just watch for updates/releases of Mockups?

I have a good relationship with Peldi, the founder of Balsamiq, and we regularly (read as: a few times per day) chat about everything. I know the upcoming features of Mockups so I can prepare Napkee in advance.

Do you expect to support other tools, if so which ones are on the radar?

Generally speaking I don’t bite off more than I can chew, so right now I’m focusing just on Balsamiq Mockups. I don’t exclude though possible developments towards other wireframing tools that use open or pseudo-open file formats, like Omnigraffle.

Will Napkee, the company, expand into other products? If so, can you mention any of the ideas?

Napkee Labs will release other products, of course. I love the User Interaction field so I really think that all the future products will  be in this area. I have some ideas that I have to develop but I will come back to them when Napkee is mature enough to give me time to dedicate to other products.

What’s the roadmap look like for Napkee? Is there going to be a “big” 2.0 release or do you expect to just releasing frequent incremental updates?

The idea is to release frequent updates to consolidate the product (support for the whole set of Mockups components, bugs that may appear, accuracy of the exports) and adding some new features (themes
for the exports, iphone components & views, etc). I’m working together with Peldi to introduce a way to have more interaction on the exports that is not limited just to links between mockups and that’s gonna be
a step forward for the application.

Eventually, for a 2.0, I would like to introduce the possibility to correct the export from Napkee (size and position of the components) and to make it a round-trip, reflecting the changes on the original Balsamiq Mockups file. Then you have to add all the possible requests I receive from the community…

I’m also evaluating the possibility to create a partnership with a Usability Testing online tool. Can you imagine? You could go from Balsamiq Mockups to a usability analysis in a matter of clicks. The next months are going to be great!

What made you choose AIR for the application instead of Silverlight or JavaFX?

Oh boy, don’t get me started on that…

I played with JavaFX after the presentation Sun give about at JavaOne 2007… after that there was the silence. I saw another presentation about it last April – when I already started with Flex – and I had the impression that the technology did not grow at all during these 2 years. Microsoft in general: I prefer open-source. Also I don’t really know if you can do such things that you can do with Flex on the desktop through AIR. I know that Silverlight is good on multimedia in general, but that was not my case.

I just love Flex and I love that fact that with a single build your product can already be distributed to Mac, Win and Linux.

How many people work on Napkee ( is it just you and Julia)?

It’s me for the coding part, marketing, sales. Julia helps me dealing with the enormous amount of requests for free licenses and also with financial aspects and bureaucracy. And a dog is on his way and I guess he will be part of the cheering team!

From  http://www.digitalchickenscratch.com