DENIM is an interesting, BSD-licensed desktop application from University of Washington. It allows web developers to sketch site and page structures easily with a stylus. Pages can be interlinked, and contain operable components like forms.

DENIM is available for Linux, Windows and Mac. I downloaded the OS X version, and scribbled with it for a while. Obviously the results would be nicer if I had a stylus or an I-pen…

This could be the perfect tool for rapid web prototyping. Once the site sketch has been created it can be exported as a set of HTML imagemaps for easier sharing.

However, to make DENIM a really useful prototyping tool for Midgard CMS, we would need to create a set of custom DENIM components for typical MidCOM components like news lists and event calendars so that users could really grasp how the site is put together by running different components (or their dynamically loaded representations).

Even nicer would be if the resulting DENIM file could be imported into Midgard to generate some of the site automatically. The DENIM file format is an XML file, so it might be possible to extract the page names, relations, and components shown on a page out of it. If so, the DENIM files might be convert-able via Exorcist to something that could be imported as a MidCOM site structure.

This would truly make DENIM a tool that would beat the usefulness of paper prototyping while retaining the ease-of-sketching.

Found DENIM via Maemo.