User interface prototyping is supposed to be a creative discipline, where the tools don’t get in the way, so you can place your ideas on the screen just like you would draw them freehand on the back of a napkin. Up until recently, however, there was not a high quality open source UI prototyper, so designers were left with the less-than-optimal workflow of creating mockups in Inkscape or the Gimp, or else forced to use proprietary web applications that limited storage or added watermarks. Those days are in the past, though, thanks to. By Nathan Willis Pencil is an easy-to-use mockup editing environment; the user simply drags-and-drops UI widgets from a toolbox onto the canvas, and resizes and rearranges them as necessary. The UI widgets remain editable, and are stacked on the canvas as individual, adjustable elements. The result is more like a “paper prototype” and has advantages over designing in a raster or vector editor, with its concerns over layers, rendering, and other inflexibilities.

Pencil provides several collections of widgets, covering generic shapes, specific desktop and mobile computer operating systems, and popular Web site toolkits. The application is also cross-platform because, interestingly enough, it is a Firefox browser extension. “Pencil can be used to create UI mockups for the web, the desktop, or any other interface. The ‘sketchy’ widgets simulate rough drawings, like in a back-of-the-envelope design. (click on image for large screenshot)” Installation and setup You can Pencil in Mozilla’s add-ons directory, but you should also consider checking the project’s home page to see if there is a newer release. The extension is provided as an.XPI download on the project site; as of press time the link did not initiate Firefox’s automatic XPI installer, but if you choose to save the file locally and open it with File ->Open, the installer will launch.

Jul 13, 2015 - Tested in Ubuntu 14.04 x64 with Pencil installed as deb (just like you). Follow these steps: 1- Download xulrunner. 2- Extract in /opt (root required). 3- Edit /usr/bin/pencil with a text editor (root required). 4- Change /usr/bin/firefox to /opt/xulrunner/xulrunner and save. It should be working now, it does for me. Apr 24, 2014 - Evolus Pencil printer allows you to export to PDF by selecting “Document >Export Document” and selecting “Export to PDF”. Open the file “stylesheet.xslt” located in your installed directory at the following path: Evolus Pencil app content pencil templates Print default.print. ID, Status, Summary. 583, New, Missing stencils Type-Defect Priority-Medium. 580, New, PDF export does not export all the elements Type-Defect Priority-Medium. 579, New, Saved. 565, New, Xubuntu installation problem because of another pencil application which has same name with evoluspencil.

There is also a stand-alone version of Pencil mentioned on the project’s page. This app uses Mozilla’s backend, so that you can run the package as a standard application program if you do not have Firefox installed, or if you simply wish to keep the applications running as separate processes. Presently, however, the packages provided in XULRunner form are not up-to-date. The most recent version of Pencil is 1.2.0, and the XULRunner version provided as a Linux TAR archive is from pre-1.0 builds. The Pencil project also has links to several extra widget collections that it calls “Stencils.” Currently there are stencil packages for flowcharts, business development presentations, the popular and JavaScript libraries, and icons designed for iPhone mockups and touch-screen gesture display.

The Stencil downloads are packaged in.ZIP files; to install them you open it with the “Tools” ->“Install New Collection” menu item in Pencil. You do not need to install any Stencils to get started however. The 1.2.0 release comes with widgets for essential geometric shapes, basic annotations (such as indicator arrows and text balloons), basic HTML elements, Windows XP and GTK+ GUI elements, a meta-package that picks up the native toolkit widgets of whatever operating system you run Pencil in, and a nice set of free-form “sketch”-like elements that simulate the drawn-loosely-on-paper look. Age Of Wushu Bot Programs here. There are even more Stencil collections available from users on the Pencil Users and its associated wiki. “In addition to the UI toolkits themselves, the annotation widgets allow you to mark up your designs with notes and bullet points. (click on image for large screenshot)” “Pencil’s ‘Native’ widget set picks up the toolkit from your desktop environment, here, GTK+, but with the correct theme automatically.” Finally, the project provides several downloadable “export templates” that Pencil uses to create HTML, PDF, or other document formats from your mockups. There are several styles available, depending on the intended usage, so it does not hurt to experiment with several.