Instant Mockup for Eclipse SWT Applications

I've been using Balsamiq a lot lately, but I started to find it tedious to do mockup's that were additions to already existing dialogs/windows in JBoss Tools.

Then over the weekend I saw Elias Volanakis blogging about how to dump the hiearchy of SWT and with some sniffing on how the Plug-In Spy works I could very quickly create my little own SWT Spy.

The Spy simply installs a command under the Alt+Shift+F3 shortcut which then takes the window in focus, generates the appropriate XML and put it in the clipboard for easy pasting into Balsamiq.

That allows me to have something like this:

and convert it into this:

Which I then can edit and enhance as I want to.

I also created a quick video of the whole process too.

Going to save me a lot of time in the future.

You can try it out your self by using http://update.xam.dk as your updatesite in Eclipse.

I made the source available at github if others want to add support for the components I didn't got around to handle yet (Warning: It's a big hack, but get's the job done :)

Hope you find it as useful as I do - Have fun!