Laugh if you will, but I've found sketching out mockups in PowerPoint to work surprisingly well and about as fast (or faster) than paper since I don't have to redraw the whole thing after too many changes are made. And to your point:
You can’t click a Photoshop mockup. This is probably the number one reason we skip static mockups. They aren’t real. Paper isn’t real either, but paper doesn’t have that expectation. A Photoshop mockup is on your screen. If it’s on your screen it should work. You can’t pull down menus in a Photoshop mockup, you can’t enter text into a field in a Photoshop mockup, you can’t click a link in a Photoshop mockup. HTML/CSS, on the other hand, is the real experience.
You can hyperlink in PowerPoint to other slides, so you can mockup the workflow a bit too. I agree that being able to click and move around a mockup is incredibly important.
That's a clever idea, and if it works for you, great. In fact I think it's a much better use than PowerPoint's intended purpose of crushing your soul bullet point by bullet point: http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/sld001.htm
It looks like you can sort of do this in Google Presentation too, though you have to figure out the URL to link to other slides.
Yeah, I have a feeling most presentation tools (Keynote, Impress, Google Presentation, etc.) would work well for this. In fact the only pain point I've ever had was the occasional desire to change the slide size. I've found that most of the basic effects in PP have a CSS equivalent as well, a surprising number of the things mocked up in PP can be recreated entirely in CSS without images.
Most of the actual graphics I use in the mockup I've made in Photoshop anyways, and just put them in the mockup, so those are reusable art assets on the final page.
(plus you can even mockup smaller gui details like drop-down menus if you are clever enough, though it's usually more work than it's worth)
I've found that most of the MS-Office tools can be abused to do a pretty good job in roles far removed from their original intent.
If you aren't already familiar with LaTeX, it takes some time to get into it. But it's definitely worth the effort! I know a lot of people who, once they started to use LaTeX-Beamer, never touched Powerpoint again.
To get a feeling of what LaTeX-Beamer is all about, you might want to have a look at the following tutorial (PDF):
I find it odd that people think the web killed HyperCard, when its descendants have been part of every office suite for the last 20 years in the form of scriptable presentation software. You can even make games in Powerpoint if you're willing to kill a few braincells using VBA.
You make a valid point. But I've found that while dedicated vector tools are designed to make high fidelity artwork, their workflows are just not as quick for just putting down stuff on the page quickly.
Case in point, I hammered out 37 slides a few weeks ago in about 2 hours that captured a rough site layout, and a simulated workflow via internal hyperlinks. Maybe it's my unfamiliarity with the better vector tools, but I doubt that I could sit down in the morning and hash out a working sketch of a site before a working lunch meeting the same day in Inkscape. (though I'd definitely want to create some of the art assets in those tools for the final design).
You can’t click a Photoshop mockup. This is probably the number one reason we skip static mockups. They aren’t real. Paper isn’t real either, but paper doesn’t have that expectation. A Photoshop mockup is on your screen. If it’s on your screen it should work. You can’t pull down menus in a Photoshop mockup, you can’t enter text into a field in a Photoshop mockup, you can’t click a link in a Photoshop mockup. HTML/CSS, on the other hand, is the real experience.
You can hyperlink in PowerPoint to other slides, so you can mockup the workflow a bit too. I agree that being able to click and move around a mockup is incredibly important.