| | Balsamiq | Pencil | OmniGraffle Pro | Visio Pro |
| One liner | Cool! | This can’t really be a Firefox addon! | Amazingly simple and powerful drawing | Practical and business-like |
| Ramp up time | none | minuscule | small | small |
| Other expertise required | none | none | none | none |
| Supports interactivity | nope | nope | nope | nope |
| Full lifecycle product (rough to spec) | rough only | rough only | yes | somewhat |
| Fun to use | absolutely! | yes | yes | somewhat |
| Ease of creating a mockup of tree navigation | drag and drop and populate | no tree stencil! | had to download Yahoo stencils | straight-forward |
| Time to build mockup of tree navigation | 15 min | 1 hr | 1 hr | 30 min |
| Quirky? | nope | somewhat | nope | nope |
| Cost | $79 | free | $199.95 | $559.95 |
| | | | | |
| | Photoshop CS4 | Illustrator CS4 | Fireworks CS4 | Dreamweaver CS4 |
| One liner | Gold standard for bitmap tools | Gold standard for vector tools | Bitmap + Vector but I still don’t get it… | Yes, there are countless HTML toolkits out there, but I still love it |
| Ramp up time | very large | very large | medium | large |
| Other expertise required | knowledge of bitmap tools | knowledge of vector tools | none (for this) | html, javascript, css |
| Supports interactivity | nope | nope | nope | yes |
| Full lifecycle product (rough to spec) | professional | professional | yes | yes |
| Fun to use | somewhat | somewhat | rendering is poor | yes |
| Ease of creating a mockup of tree navigation | from scratch | from scratch | no default tree! | had to find javascript tree control and figure out how to use |
| Time to build mockup of tree navigation | 1 hr | 1 hr | gave up | gave up |
| Quirky? | difference between Illustrator and PS can be confusing | difference between Illustrator and PS can be confusing | average | nope |
| Cost | $699 | $599 | $299 | $399 |
| | | | | |
| | Flash CS4 | Flex 3 Pro | Thermo(codename) | Powerpoint 2007 |
| One liner | You can do whatever you want - total interactive flexibility | With some programming experience this rocks! | Not released yet - but from experience on the beta I have high hopes | Great prototyping tool for the earnest product manager |
| Ramp up time | huge | medium | large | negligible |
| Other expertise required | programming | programming | none | none |
| Supports interactivity | oh yes! | oh yes! | yes! | okay… yes |
| Full lifecycle product (rough to spec) | yes | rough - not really a visual tool | sort of | rough only |
| Fun to use | yes | subjective, but for me yes | yes! | no |
| Ease of creating a mockup of tree navigation | no built-in tree | easier than flash because of built-in tree, but still not automatic | medium | no tree |
| Time to build mockup of tree navigation | gave up | 1 hr | 1 hr | 2 hr |
| Quirky? | not really | nope | nope | nope |
| Cost | $699 | $699 | ? | $299 |
| | | | | |
| | Axure | iRise Pro | Microsoft Expression Blend 2 | Microsoft Expression Design 2 |
| One liner | Why? | Think process, large teams, … but why? | Microsoft’s Flash | Microsoft’s Fireworks |
| Ramp up time | very large | very large | very large | large |
| Other expertise required | none | none | a little more than Flash | a little more than Fireworks |
| Supports interactivity | I think | I think | yes | nope |
| Full lifecycle product (rough to spec) | yes | yes | yes | professional |
| Fun to use | no | no | no | no |
| Ease of creating a mockup of tree navigation | didn’t find tree immediately | didn’t find tree immediately | didn’t try - too tired to go on - opened the interface and started clicking around and just closed it | Stopped with Blend 2 - I hope the argument for these tools is not “MS Office integration |
| Time to build mockup of tree navigation | gave up | gave up | gave up | didn’t try |
| Quirky? | not really | not really | don’t know | don’t know |
| Cost | $589 | $6,995 | $499 | $699 (for Studio - couldn’t find individual) |
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