I didn’t have the licence.
I did have work to do.
A personal project by Antonio Trento, born in the space between receiving an attachment and being able to open it.
The requirement was very concrete
My boss uses Balsamiq to prepare mockups. I need to turn them into work: understand screens, read text, reconstruct flows, and develop. But I don’t have the licence. When the project arrives without an image export, the handoff stalls before it even begins.
I could wait. Ask for the PNG. Send a reminder. Ask again with a more diplomatic emoji. At some point I decided to write software instead.
“I don’t have the tool” shouldn’t automatically become “I can’t move forward”.
The gap only looks small on paper
The person creating the document sees a screen. The person receiving the file sees an extension. Between them sits a dependency: a licence, a forgotten export, someone available at the right moment. Telario tries to reduce that dependency by making the content readable and workable on my machine.
The problem isn’t Balsamiq. It is an incomplete handoff for the recipient’s actual toolset. A good image export remains an excellent solution. Telario exists for the occasions when that export is missing, an archive needs inspecting, or a small correction doesn’t deserve another round of messages.
A personal project, without a revolution department
There is no promise to replace every feature of the original editor. There is a working app with a verifiable scope: opening .bmpr archives, rendering wireframes, making essential edits, and producing useful exports. Approximations are documented, and saving to the original format remains experimental.
The code is available to inspect on GitHub. A public repository does not, by itself, provide a general licence for the project: the app’s licence is still to be chosen. Dependencies keep their own licences and attribution notices.
Why “Telario”
A loom holds elements and relationships together. A wireframe does something similar: it shows the structure before the finishing touches. The identity follows that idea with a window, a grid, and an orange element stepping out of its frame. Petrol blue for structure; orange for the move that gets work going again.
The name and symbol belong to this small project’s identity. The story will be familiar to anyone who has received the right file at the wrong moment, with the wrong software available.
Behind the project
I’m Antonio Trento. I build tools when an obstacle is specific enough to describe and annoying enough to deserve a solution. This time the obstacle was a mockup. The result is another way to read it.