[Sigia-l] swipr officially released

[Jacco Nieuwland]

Hi All,

As you may or may not know, I have been working on a toolset for Visio 
that allows the integration of sitemaps/screenflows and wireframes into 
one fully interactive HTML deliverable. After nearly a year of working 
with it in-house in different projects and environments, my employer 
(User Intelligence) and I have decided to make this tool available to 
the IA community.
During the Euro IA Summit last month in Berlin, I have officially 
released version 0.50. Swipr is released under the GNU Open Source 
license, and is completely free. You can download it from www.swipr.com.

A highlevel overview of what swipr can do:

    * it allows for one screenflow/sitemap document and multiple
      wireframe documents to be exported into one integrated HTML set,
      viewable by any browser;
    * it also has the option of creating a simple prototype from all
      your wireframes, by defining hyperlink objects in the wireframes.
      These are then exported as imagemaps and placed over the wireframes;
    * because of the fact that multiple files can be used, it is very
      easy to work on projects with more than one person;
    * your target audience does not need any special plugin or software
      to view the prototype;
    * the prototype can easily be used for early usability testing;
    * because all documents are created in Visio, you still have a
      perfect printable set for documentation purposes.


Swipr is not finished. It will undoubtedly have a couple of bugs, and 
you will probably quickly come up with some things that you're missing 
or would like to add. Because it is an open source project, you are more 
than welcome to add functionality to it, or request additional 
functions. If you start developing extra functions, it would be great if 
people start sharing these as well!

For more information, have a look at swipr.com. There are examples, a 
forum and of course the downloadable swipr toolset. If you have any 
questions, please send those to info at swipr.com.

Cheers,

Jacco