Do you have good examples of WYSIWYG / GUI based editors for User Interface or App design?

July 26, 2012 3:58 AM

Do you have good examples of WYSIWYG / GUI based editors for User Interface or App design?

I'm writing a report on interface design and need to give examples of various WYSIWYG Editors for different purposes. For example:

Flash and/or Fireworks for designing Web Apps and rich content sites.
Dreamweaver for Web design.
Microsoft Expression Blend for UI Design.
Flash combined with Scaleform for Game UI Design.

Are there any other successful interface design tools that I have missed, that use a GUI rather than primarily code based.

posted by stackhaus23 to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

All of the Microsoft developer tools with names that begin with "Visual" are usually designed around a drag-and-drop interface, as are their commercial competitors and even some open source competitors.
posted by XMLicious at 4:05 AM on July 26, 2012

Apple's Interface Builder provides a GUI for laying out iOS apps.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 4:14 AM on July 26, 2012

Omnigraffle works very nicely for web design, if you are talking about the design, and not the coding part.
posted by rockindata at 5:01 AM on July 26, 2012

LabVIEW
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 5:10 AM on July 26, 2012

I honestly would not use Dreamweaver as a good example of a web design app UI. It's a mess to work in. Sadly, Adobe killed their good example of a wysiwyg UI, GoLive.

Coda, on the Mac, is a pretty slick gui web editor. There's also Espresso.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:20 AM on July 26, 2012

There is the layout mode in App inventor formerly of Google and now based at MIT. It is couples with a scratch like backend for writing the code, but the layout of the buttons and things is almost WYSIWYG, except for the things that can be added and aren't able to be seen (in reality they have no visual components like sounds and a timekeeper).
posted by koolkat at 7:43 AM on July 26, 2012

Apple's Interface Builder operates on the OSX side as well, and actually goes back all the way to Cocoa's ancestor, NeXT, in the early 1990s. A little discussion on c2wiki.

The current big X11 toolkits have Glade, QtDesigner, wxGlade (no relation), and probably miscellaneous other tools.

The direct-manipulation tradition you're talking about owes a lot to the old Smalltalk community (eg via), which survives in things like Squeak. Here's a Squeak UI builder.
posted by hattifattener at 11:53 AM on July 26, 2012

even good old Visio is pretty useful for GUI design. The OOB shapes aren't that attractive, but there are plenty available that are pretty good.
posted by mattoxic at 6:47 PM on July 26, 2012