Today at the Indianapolis Productivity Summit with Robby Slaughter I learned of a really cool website that let’s you do quick and casual mock-ups. The website is called Balsamiq and the example used in the session today was for mocking up a quick idea for a website with general blocks of content, navigation and image placeholders.

Snagit of Balsamiq website

The idea presented in the summit by Robby Slaughter was that part of the benefits of loose mockups of user-interfaces, websites and more is that when you keep it casual and quick you don’t get mired down in the details.

The balsamiq website from what I saw today gives you exactly that functionality and more.

Using Balsamiq Mockups feels like you are drawing, but it’s digital, so you can tweak and rearrange controls easily, and the end result is much cleaner. Teams can come up with a design and iterate over it in real-time in the course of a meeting.

The next time you need to get a visual of what something will look like, how exactly how you envision that user-interface working, go uncover Balsamiq for yourself and see if it doesn’t help you get your ideas communicated to others in a more clear and helpful manner than just words or your own efforts at business Pictionary on a cocktail napkin.

Image: Product marketing logos collage

I just read this article that provided a quick summary and overview of 10 great applications that would be useful for anyone trying to get work done. You could be a small business owner, an independent consultant or just an individual that needs some more resources in their back pocket to get more done in their day.

These are all some great apps, some are free some are not, but all of them are completely useful and would quickly become business critical after a bit of use.

Read the entire article at Sitepoint for more details about each, as well as more applications and feedback that people are sharing in the comments on the post.

Uncovered by Darren Rowse, Problogger on twitter