I first got a tablet because I was blown away by a friend demoing his work to me at a morning coffee meeting. I saw it as an elegant way to present work to friends, clients, coworkers and prospective employers.

Once I bought my tablet (Android-powered Asus Eee Pad Transformer - love it!), I saw the potential to use it for a little more. Luckily, the folks over at Adobe did, too.

So when I first learned Adobe was working on a suite of touch apps, I was pretty excited. Other developers who had wireframing and sketching apps in the field weren't that great (with the exception of Autodesk's SketchBook, of course), and the ability to work with my existing toolset on my desktops was simply not there. I was hoping Adobe would change that.

Adobe has released a number of their apps, some on Android first, some on iPad, but eventually they'll all be available on all platforms. I gave Adobe Proto a test drive and was impressed by some things, and disappointed in others.

First the good stuff! I really liked how they utilized gestures to create elements on the page. It was a nice way to use the natural interactions of gestures, rather than the tap-and-drag of the other apps. Once I played around a little, it only took a few minutes to memorize them - they really were more natural. Making a wireframe image was as easy as creating an "X" gesture; a video a play button-like triangle; a paragraph of text a big zig zag. The gestures did feel like the natural scribbling I would do for myself on a white board or scratch paper, and it was nice to see it immediately visually translated into something for public consumption.

Nice!

You can even create new pages and link things together, and do some minor tweaking with fonts.

The toolset is a good start, but there really aren't a lot of options. A half dozen button options or so, line of text, like for headlines, paragraph of text, and a half dozen other controls.

After creating a project, you can then upload it to Adobe's Creative Cloud (registration available in-app - $20G free!) from within the app. I felt like the process was overall pretty smooth.

Heading on over to Adobe Creative Cloud, my project was there, and previewing it showed me nice clean HTML. (Horrible CSS!) Videos were represented by the new Video tag, and reasonable ids and classes were in the markup, too.

You can then share your prototype with coworkers or clients by sending them a link through the share button. They'll be able to comment, but not click around. (I couldn't even get a download link to appear for my buddy who was test-driving it with me, but I think I might've done something wrong.)

Overall, the app is nice and simple, and can be used for basic wireframing. But here are the downsides.

I didn't like that the UI didn't have labels on buttons. Some things were just too ambiguous, and there's no way to "hover" in a touch environment to see a tooltip. So, you have tap and hold and then try to figure it out without inadvertantly doing something you didn't want to do.

And as far as features are concerned, the app is very very basic. I would only use this for simple content websites. It would not make it on a more complex site, or application. There needs to be many more wireframe controls and/or the ability to add my own. And while the app is called "Proto", the only interactivity presented seems to be a link to somewhere else.

Uploading wireframes wasn't as considered as I'd like. It would be nice to be emailed or shown a link on how to share, rather than having to go into Creative Cloud to get it. Also, making a change required uploading again, and then having to resolve a conflict because "a file with the same name already exists"; it didn't automatically sync, and it didn't figure out how to update the same file.

Collaborating, viewing, and giving feedback wasn't so great, either. I don't want clients or coworkers to download a zip file of html and css! If I can preview it in Creative Coud, why can't they?

Overall, Adobe Proto and Creative Cloud are first-generation products. I appreciated the level of polish (no bugs, crashes, or inconsistencies), but features-wise, it was pretty sparse. Definitely not usable for more advanced wireframing work - complex websites, web apps, and the like - but it might be OK for the small design studio work. It was OK, but I look forward to the upgrade.

I think the $10 price tag was super-reasonable, though it did feel more like a beta. Although Android lets you return an app within 15 minutes, I felt it was worth it for Adobe to know that there are people out there like me who want this, and I wanted to support their effort. And it was just 10 bucks for crying out loud. I can see this being much more polished and available for 5 or 10 times that. (And you know Adobe; that might happen.)

Have you tried Adobe Proto or other touch wireframing tools? What did you think?