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Free GUI Prototyping

Posted on May 3, 2009, 1:38 am, by freewareguy, under Soft.

Pencil GUI prototyping
When you were a kid, didn’t your grandmother said that you should study to become a lawyer, a doctor, or perhaps a teacher? Can’t you remember her telling you that if you had done that, you would have a stable career with great income and awesome prestige? But no… you had to do what you wanted uh? What is this programming career deal you speak of? Isn’t programming what you do to universal remotes in order to control with ease your TV and VCR? And now you are stuck because you require a ‘GUI prototyping tool’ to ‘design’ your next project… what on earth is that? Are you even speaking english? Oh! and on top of that, you want this tool for free… are you serious?

Well you are in great luck, because like a good citizen of planet earth, I happen to use this web browser called fire a fox or something. Yep, and it just so happen that the other day after my morning coffee, I happen to stumble upon my engagement ring. Gosh! I thought I had lost it. In any case, as I was firing the fox, I saw this plugin called Pencil. Yes, a pencil in cyberspace.

You see, according to the smart people of the internet, Pencil uses the Mozilla Gecko engine, and in just a 400 kilobyte installation package, it turns fire a fox 3 into an excellent sketching tool. But that’s not all of it. After all, Pencil runs on pretty much any platform where firefox 3 is supported. Don’t you see how exciting that is?!

Pencil has common shapes found on many actual programs, plenty of widgets for windows, and supports adding external objects into the drawing area. Now of course, I am ignorant in these matters, but I am told that Pencil even allows you to create scale, rotate, align and perform z-ordering of your assets (what goes on front and what goes on the back). Sounds very complex to me, since I tend to use napkins for my projects… like making a list of the groceries I need you know?

Oh, and did I mention that once you are pleased with your design, you can save all those things for posterity onto a PNG file? Yeah, no loss of quality in there! But look here.. not happy with making a plugin that would run on firefox, the developers of Pencil also offer it as a standalone program (still using the mozilla gecko engine). And before I forget… with Pencil, you can not only create software GUI mockups, but also website mockups.

And if you are not completely satisfied with my suggestions, well, there is always DENIM, or Napkin Look & feel, or Dynamic Draw. Look for a link to them below these screenshots.