Pencil for GUI Prototyping

No, not that kind of pencil. This kind of Pencil.

I had to make a quick mockup for a project proposal recently. Quick as in I heard about the project at 10:00am and had the project proposal out the door by 3:00pm (and I am not a lunch-skipper). I opened Pencil, my favorite gotta-get-it-done-quick mockup tool, and within a few minutes I had a couple of mockups like this:

Hand-drawny look.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned Pencil before, so I figured I’d give it a plug. It’s free software, licensed under the GPL v2. Development seems to have tapered off a while ago, but for a quick UI mockup it’s still faster than anything else in my toolbox.

You’ll have to download the stand-alone app, as it hasn’t been updated for Firefox 4+. To get it to work under 64bit linux:

• Make sure you have the ia32 libs installed.
• Ubuntu/Debian: sudo apt-get install ia32-libs
• Download the Pencil "other" zip package and unzip it into a folder.
• Download the latest xulrunner 1.9 runtime (right now you'd find it here) and unzip the xulrunner folder into the same folder you put Pencil in.
• Double click pencil in that folder, and off it'll go.