Pencil: The best thing since sliced bread?

Well, probably not, but Pencil is still pretty damn cool!

But what is Pencil? According to the Pencil Project website their:

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

But what does this really mean? Well, from my point of view you could condense the above sentence into one that reads as “a massive time saver”.

Pencil is a Firefox addon (or stand alone app if you have XULRunner installed)  that lets you quickly sketch out a website or desktop application without having to use a heavy duty graphics package. It is pretty much as close as it gets to paper prototyping without using paper.

In my day job I have to do a lot of prototyping. Whether it is for a desktop app, a new website or a funky cool mobile web app. And as much as it sounds, prototyping is not all glamour! It can be incredibly dull and monotonous (which is why I recommend di.fm loud in the headphones). However, Pencil is proving to be a huge time saver. As an example, the image above is the result of about 1 minute of playing about with Pencil for this article. It’s not amazing, but it is a damn sight better than the results after 1 minute playing about in Fireworks or Photoshop.

If you have any level of prototyping to do, download Pencil!