These days there are roughly 5,000,000 new web apps released every day, half of which are shady lead gen efforts by online marketers, but of the other 2.5MM legitimate web apps released every day there is the occasional gem. Like a friend used to say, you gotta pick through the shit to get to the corn. Every day I spend a little time doing just that at Feedmyapp and, sometimes, KillerStartups.  It was a few months ago that I first discovered JustProto on one of these sites or another like it.  I figured if I’m going to have a blog, one thing I should do with it is give back to people who have done really good work – and the team at JustProto not only does really good work, but helps myself and others do really good work too.

If you’ve ever played around with Axure (or any dedicated wireframing tool) you’ll pick up JustProto really quickly, which they make even easier by giving you the standard 37signals-style free thirty day trial on a paid account or free one-project account.  To get started, click here.

There’s nothing I hate worse than blog review circlejerks that are entirely sunny, which is why I’m only bothering to recommend things that I really find useful, so I’ll try to add some meat.  Once you’ve logged in and created a project, you start with the standard wireframing setup of creating pages and masters – masters are the usual widely-included elements like headers and footers.  Pages are, you know, pages.  Click around, insert some icons, enter some text – play with the element properties.  You know the drill.

Where JustProto really shines is in its simplicity, its collaborative functionality and the constant attention to upgrades.  There are all kinds of new prototyping tools these days thanks to the new push toward more flowing, organic wireframes and the main feature of these seems to be that they’re pretty.  Your wireframe can look like a sketch or feature objects with gradients.  Woohoo.  To be fair, these new apps let you designate a lot of functionality that was very difficult with older apps – like indicating multiple states for a single object – and JustProto doesn’t do this (yet).  But if you prefer an application that lets you pump out clean, simple wireframes to demonstrate functionality to clients and co-workers at a persistent URL and if you want a web-based application that anyone can log in to and that you can work on collaboratively, JustProto really is top notch.

For those of you, like me, who try to keep as much of your work as possible virtual it’s really a Godsend.  If you’re reading this then you already know what a wireframing and prototyping tool is, so just go have a look at their demo and some of their more recent blog posts.  If you like it, and I do, drop them a note on their blog or something and let them know.  I think people don’t do that kind of thing often enough, but other web developers should recall how nice it is to get pleasant and unexpected feedback (because it never fucking happens).