How to Design New Application User Interface

Jul 30, 2008 Author: Daniel | Filed under: GUI

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Application development has now becoming more and more complex than ever. In the old days, it’s one person hacking away. After months of effort you get yourself a lovely app. Maybe it has something to do with music, TV, movies or maybe do your taxes. Now-a-days these developments are done by teams of people. So even if you want to do everything, it’s always better to have team to do it because they get it, they’re committed and they really want to go off and do their next generation Turbo Tax project. If you happen to be the GUI / User Interface design guy, then this tip is for you.

I went on my quest to find a good tool that will help me with my project. In the past, I’d either code the entire UI or I’d use photoshop or Powerpoint which are pretty hard to use for this purpose. It’s also pretty tough to share your work with others. Don’t expect them to know how to change it after you’re done. My criteria were:

Easy to use, about as simple as Visio and not having to read a 1,000page manual before I start
Functionally rich – ability to draw any GUI base objects that I want
Free – does everything I want for free

And then… I landed on the pencil project. It has everything I wanted and more… Pencil is a light weight plugin into Firefox that allows you to make GUI prototype with ease. Not only was I installed the tool (on top of Firefox) in no time. I was on my way doing designing within seconds. It’s so easy to use and not to mention beautiful with whatever I draw. To download the software simply click here.

The Pencil Project’s unique mission is to build a free and open source tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping that everyone can use.

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