alanc's dashboard

I am neutral between the first proposal and the second (LaLomi's).

Re the third screen shot (Gavin Jolly's) I have used Enterprise Architect in the past, and the first thing I usually did was close a bunch of the windows in order to increase my working space. Likewise, with Eclipse and other IDEs, I like to customize the workspace to reduce the number of windows and just keep the few that remain all grouped on one side of the other. So I agree with the commentators who say you shouldn't give the users too much choice - just a bit more than we have at present!

Re the suggestion to have "fly-out" or "pop-out" panels, which appear when you move the mouse to the edge of the screen, if I get a vote, then it's against them! I find it distracting and annoying when things pop out at me as I move my mouse around my screen (which I'm generally doing for some other purpose than looking for a menu). Please, let the menus stay still and/or wait until I explicitly invoke them.

As an intermittent user of Balsamiq rather than a daily user, I am better off seeing the controls represented in a toolbar rather than having to remember their names to select from a drop-down list. So it would be useful to have the option of pinning the UI Library to the side rather than the top.

Is this something that is particularly hard to do in an air application? Going through the threads in this community, I can see several that have asked for essentially the same thing; they're all months old, but still the option hasn't made it's way into a release

My monitor is wider than it is high (as I suspect are most), which means I can afford to lose more work space to a toolbar at the sides than at the top or bottom. So it would be useful if the UI Library could be undocked from the top and pinned to the side of the viewport instead.

A lot of products have "Properties Windows" that can be docked to the sides of the viewport, and which have different properties visible depending on what has the focus in the main area. Examples: Firebug in the Firefox browser, diagramming and modelling tools like Visio and Enterprise Architect, IDEs like Visual Studio and Eclipse. Come to that, end-user programs like MS Word now have Style panels etc that open pinned to the side of the view port, so I think if Balsamiq Mockups was to have a dockable or pinnable toolbox, no one would really be phased by seeing the contents of it change or get enabled/disabled as the focus changed.