If you're a Firefox user, then you already know that one of the things that make this open-source browser so popular is its extensibility --the big galaxy of useful extensions you can use with it. I for one, have a couple of add-ons/extensions/plug-ins that I simply cannot continue online without. I'll even go out on a limb and say that Firefox's extensibility is the reason the browser has become my desktop. But this post is not about Firefox or its many plug-ins ... I'm sure I'll cover some of the top ones on another Tip Tuesday here on Ahmadism. Rather, it's about one particular plug-in that I think many, especially for developers (and the geeks-at-heart like yours truly) who know a thing or two about basic design (or think they do): Pencil.




Onscreen text editing supports both plain texts and rich texts:




At first glance, Pencil may seem like a drawing tool; but its tools, shapes and widgets sets apart. Here's a glimpse at some of Pencil's features (from the project's home page):
- 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
- And much more...
It's not uncommon that projects have wireframes (usually done by Information Architects, Business Analysts and/or both), and Designers have mockups (aka "comps" ... although there is a difference). At one point, there may come a need to have both overlap to see how they "fit." Needless to say, Pencil fills that gap. You can take this a step farther or bring it back a notch. All in all, the tool is truly inspirational in many ways. And given that it's part of your browser (many of us don't use it as a stand-alone), and if you save it to Dropbox-like solution, this turns the entire approach to a cloud-computing one that is accessible from any where. As a repository for your finished work, and to offload some space from your Dropbox-like solution, you can always use Google Docs (if you exported your work to a document of sorts like an OpenOffice or Word document, HTML or PDF). ▣
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