Oracle DRM Blog

23 Jul, 2008

Designing User Interface

Posted by: Daniel In: Tips 'n' Tricks

Application development has now becoming more and more complex than ever. In the old days, it’s one person hacking away. After months of effort you get yourself a lovely app. Maybe it has something to do with music, TV, movies or maybe do your taxes. Now-a-days these developments are done by teams of people. So even if you want to do everything, it’s always better to have team to do it because they get it, they’re committed and they really want to go off and do their next generation Turbo Tax project. If you happen to be the GUI / User Interface design guy, then this tip is for you.

Pen Sketch

As an application developer, I went on my quest to find a good tool that will help me with my project. In the past, I’d either code the entire UI or I’d use photoshop or Powerpoint which are pretty hard to use for this purpose. It’s also pretty tough to share your work with others. Don’t expect them to know how to change it after you’re done. And so, the quest continues. I checked on literally one dozen of different tools. My criteria were:

  • Easy to use, about as simple as Visio and not having to read a 1,000page manual before I start
  • Functionally rich – ability to draw any GUI base objects that I want
  • Free – does everything I want for free

And then I landed on the pencil project. Pencil is a light weight plugin into Firefox that allows you to make GUI prototype with ease. To download the software simply click here. The Pencil Project’s unique mission is to build a free and open source tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping that everyone can use.

Here’re the top features:

  • Built-in stencils for diagraming and prototyping
  • Multi-page document with background page
  • On-screen text editing with rich-text supports
  • PNG rasterizing
  • Undo/redo supports
  • Installing user-defined stencils
  • Standard drawing operations: aligning, z-ordering, scaling, rotating…
  • Cross-platforms
  • Adding external objects

After one day of work, I finished my prototyping and sent it off for review. In the meantime, Pencil remains in my arsenal of tools.

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2 Responses to "Designing User Interface"

1 | Mike Harmon

July 23rd, 2008 at 8:01 pm

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Great post. I will read your posts frequently. Added you to the RSS reader.

2 | Daniel

July 30th, 2008 at 12:34 pm

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Mike, you’re most welcome. Pls let me know how I can do better.

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