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Advantages Building a prototype has several advantages.

Find out if the game works

Try out different ideas

Prototypes allows you to turn those designs into prototypes that you can interact with through the mouse on your Mac or by tapping on your iPhone. You simply draw and link hotspots and set animations, share your interface with other stakeholders, and get testing. To get a feel for the output Prototypes creates before spending the cash, head over to ptyp.es on your iPhone, follow the instructions presented to you for installation, and enter the PIN 1234 5678. You’ll be able to try out a Prototypes-generated interface yourself.

Exporting & Saving One thing that SVG can’t do is save the resulting image as a bitmap. It’s easy for <canvas> because the element is already a bitmap in the first place! The canvas can export its image to a data URL (e.g., data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGg...). This data may then be rendered in the browser, which could then be saved or dragged to the desktop, used in a new canvas, and so on. The browser must support PNG images, and it may have varying support for GIF and JPG. For our example, we’ll stick with PNG since it supports alpha transparency, and where we haven’t drawn on the canvas, it’ll be transparent. To get the data URL, we simply call canvas.toDataURL('image/png'). Note that we’re calling toDataURL() on the <canvas> element, not on the 2D context. This is because we’re getting all the pixels in the canvas, not just the pixels in a particular context. So taking the example we’ve put together already, we’ll make the browser redirect to a PNG version of the image when a user clicks on the <canvas> element (a contrived example, I know!): canvas.onclick = function () {  window.location = canvas.toDataURL('image/png');};

Ever wanted to make presentations a more interactive, Web 2.0 experience? The PowerPoint Twitter Tools prototypes are now available. Created using SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius (but requiring only PowerPoint for Windows and Adobe Flash to run), the twitter tools allow presenters to see and react to tweets in real-time, embedded directly within their presentations, either as a ticker or refreshable comment page.