[Tool] Pencil - UI prototyping / sketching

[thomthom]

I was looking for a free/cheap tool to mock up UI designs / wireframes. Came across this one:

http://pencil.evolus.vn/en-US/Home.aspx

@unknownuser said:

The Pencil Project's unique mission is to build a free and opensource tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping that everyone can use.

Top features:

* Built-in stencils for diagraming and prototyping
* Multi-page document with background page
* Inter-page linkings!
* On-screen text editing with rich-text supports
* Exporting to HTML, PNG, Openoffice.org document, Word document and PDF.
* Undo/redo supports
* Installing user-defined stencils and templates
* Standard drawing operations: aligning, z-ordering, scaling, rotating...
* Cross-platforms
* Adding external objects
* Personal Collection
* Clipart Browser
* Object snapping
* Sketchy Stencil
* And much more...

Did a quick test and it worked pretty well.

http://www.thomthom.net/software/sketchup/plugin_manager/prototype/

I allows you to also use native UI widgets.

Anyone knows of other similar tools?
I saw some of the commercial alternatives appeared to have more interaction options.

I was about to use Visual Studio Express to put something together, but it seemed like an overkill.

[Dan Rathbun]

Interesting, but does it just make "sketches" or can it actually make applets ?

[thomthom]

It's just UI drafting. You can get addon packages to add chart diagram symbols.

[Jim]

Still useful and cool, thanks for the link.

You must have found Glade when searching for a UI designer - it supports quite a few language bindings. Even JavaScript, which I found interesting. Does that mean you can write desktop apps in JavaScript using gtk widgets?