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.
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.
- Questions and Answers
- Tools you’ll need when using Oracle DRM – Part 1
- Review of Oracle Hyperion DRM 9.3.2
- Troubleshooting DRM (IIS)
- Automate a Parent-Child hierarchy build – Part 3
- Master Data Management Stress
- Virtualize MDM
- Who is Using Hyperion DRM?
- Special Characters in Master Data Objects
- Introduction to building a financial hierarchy in DRM – Part 2
