a blog on prototyping by pidoco°

We’ve constantly been asked whether we do have some specific iOS stencils for pidoco. Today we can say, yes we do!

We are starting the roll-out of Pidoco Mobile with a private beta phase where you may be added to create iOS prototypes and test them directly on your device. Some of you may now ask, ‘and what about Android?’ Once we have fully rolled out the iOS part of Pidoco Mobile we start working on Android, so please be a little patient about it.

What is Pidoco Mobile?

It consists of two parts: the web application for creating the iOS prototypes (as you know pidoco already, but with new stencils) and the iOS app to simulate the prototypes on your device.

For the web application, you need to have a modern browser on your desktop PC (or Mac, for sure). We officially support Firefox, Safari (Mac only is recommended), or Google Chrome. On top, we heard that Microsoft IE 9 is working well, too, although not yet being officially supported. The iOS prototypes that you can create do run only in these browsers plus Opera and IE 9. We skipped the support for the older IE versions (8 and earlier) to simplify our development efforts. In general, if your browser supports native SVG then it is very likely to run our prototypes.

The iOS app provides you with a list of your iOS prototypes. First, pick one of these prototype and you see its pages. Then pick a page and the prototype is opened in either the sketched or plain mode. Take it from there to test your prototype, get a feeling for the correct sizes and measurements of the elements, and see whether your concepts work. We have added a demo account with which you can try a prototype of the Facebook app to give you an impression of what’s possible. The pidoco app is available for both iPhones and iPads.

How can I participate?

To install the iOS app on your device, please sign up with testflight right from your device. You will then have to register your device so we can add it to the builds of our app. (You might have heard that for such a test, we have to add every single device to the app for it to be installable.) If you followed the above link then we will be informed and can create a new build that we then can send you. To install the build you will have to open the link from the email on your device, the rest is done by testflight. UPDATE: we finished the private beta phase. It will be released soon for everybody to use.

If you already have a pidoco account, then we need to activate the iOS prototypes for that account. The best way is to send us a short mail (contact@pidoco.com). In case you have not yet an account you may create one and use the 31 days free trial. In this case we also need to activate your account before you can create an iOS prototype.

I have feedback. How do I let you know?

We know that this beta version of Pidoco Mobile might not yet be complete and that you will very likely miss a feature. If we know about this we can add it to our development process. There are different ways of how to tell us such ideas:

• You can chat with us: https://pidoco.com/contact/chat
• Feel free to send us a message on twitter: @pidoco
• We are happy about any email we receive: contact@pidoco.com
• It’s also possible to leave us a comment on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pidoco
• We do have a feedback forum where you can add new requests and vote existing ones: http://pidoco.uservoice.com
• You may even give us a call: +49 30 4881 6385

Just pick a channel to talk to us, we’re happy to hear from you!

(Please note that we created the Facebook prototype on our own and only for demo purposes. There was no involvement of Facebook.)