I had been looking for a way to do some wireframing for blog layout ideas, web pages, or these days iPhone app ideas. In the past my tool of choice had been Powerpoint. Very odd, I know, but it gives me the rough drawing tools and a big white piece of paper. Visio just had too much stuff to setup in order to do basic drawing, so that was not really a choice. If I still had a copy of MacDraw on my computer, I probably would use that. I really just wanted something basic.

What I found in iPlotz was simple MacDraw ease of use, with drag and drop web interface widgets. It does much more than that, of course, but it does everything pretty elegantly.  The screen shot shows you some of the variety of widget types that are supported. I dragged a bunch of them onto a page to show menus, pie charts, a tag cloud, video window, image placeholders, and greeking text. Each of these behaves just like a draw object, in that you can resize and drag any of them. While you’re resizing, the size of the object shows up in the middle of it and updates realtime.

There is also a sitemap function, so you can create parent/child relationships with your wireframes. You can also export and import XML into any wireframe, which is a little beyong my technical capabilities, but it would save your web developers time if they already had the interface elements, and their sizes, done automatically.

iPlotz also supports team development and various multi-contributor features. Looking at the detail of the screen shot on the right shows that you can create tasks with start dates, end dates, assignments, completion percentages, and all the good stuff that development teams need.

For the geeks out there who want to know what this tool was created with, this is an Adobe Flex app. It’s a really cool example of what kind of RIA development you can do with Flex. Unfortunatley iPlotz is not an Austin company, but I really wish we had more folks in Austin doing rich apps for consumers in Flex. Feel free to leave some links in the comments with any suggestions on great Flex apps done by Austinites.

There is a free version that lets you develop a site with 5 pages. For $15/month you get unlimited projects at 1G of storage, and at higher levels you can get the desktop version. If you do wireframes for clients all the time, I could see this being a great part of your development toolkit.