Gui Magnets

This is what I meant with "reality-first"!

Read about it here.

The idea is simple:
- magnets to place on whiteboards, and that you can draw on and erase
- the magnets look like classic GUI elements
- you compose the GUI with customers and colleagues, rapidly and in a true collaborative way
- then take a picture of the GUI, and (if I get it right!) convert the picture to the actual scheleton of the GUI via some software...
[It is possible that I'm just wrong and the company does not provide any software to analyze the photo and covert it to the actual GUI implementation... but in that case, that would be a great exercise in computer vision for some of the eager hands out there... :D ]

Anyway: it is just great!

Too bad the product comes with a large price tag...
So one option could be DIY:
- use sticky-notes or
- print a bunch of labels representing the different GUI elements, then buy a bit of magnet-tape (like this)
- if each GUI element has a small marker (as discussed here), perhaps you could write a simple image-manipulation program that can recognize them and convert a picture of the GUI to an actual prototype in some language (even simply an HTML form...)

I think that would be a great tool to collaboratively design user interfaces, XP-style.