[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

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?