April 26th marked the kickoff of the TriUPA Community Event series, with a great interactive presentation by multiple speakers focused on prototyping tools.  More than 40 members and guests were in attendance.   We held the event at Atlantic BT near Crabtree Mall.  The event was a great success.  The evening began in typical TriUPA fashion with a half hour of networking and a light dinner.

Tools and presenters included:

• Omnigraffle: Todd Moy
• InDesign: Jon Howarth
• ProtoShare: Rick Phelps
• Axure: Andrew Wirtanen
• Balsamiq Mockups: Colin Butler
• CSS/HTML/JavaScript: Adrian Pomilio

We followed this with brief 5 minute presentations by each of the speakers about their particular favorite prototyping tool.  After the series of short presentations, we broke out into 6 separate session at Atlantic BT where attendees could move freely between the simultaneous sessions to see the prototyping tools in action,  watch ad hoc demos, and ask questions from each of the presenters.  The format allowed attendees to freely roam between demos, and stay for as little or long as they wanted.

The evening closed with a raffle giveaway.  Our thanks to Axure, ProtoShare and Balsamiq for their donations.  We gave away one license to Axure RP Pro 6.0 (worth $589), one license to ProtoShare 6.2 Business Edition (worth $590),  and several licenses to Balsamiq Mockups for Desktop (worth $79).

Several members noted they wanted to make this an annual event. It was great to actually see all the tools and their different areas of focus on the prototyping process!