Pencil : An Excellent Screen Mock Up Software

Want to create quick screen mockups of your application or Web Pages for free? Use Mozilla Pencil add-on to do it!

Pencil is a GPL 2 licensed software, personally I feel it really an Excellent tool, it really covers almost all the features required for a Mock up tool like support for displaying Disabled Buttons, Default Buttons , Progress Bars, Window Frames, Iframes bulleting, separators, Tables, Tab Panes and many more.

It has some very interesting features like:

• Built-in stencils for diagramming and prototyping
• Multi-page document with background page
• On-screen text editing with rich-text supports
• PNG rasterizing
• Undo/redo supports
• Installing user-defined stencils
• Standard drawing operations: aligning, z-ordering, scaling, rotating...
• Adding external objects

It also has Drag drop support, you can drag and drop a Image on to the editor it creates a Bitmap Image with the image.

Currently you can only save the pencil documents for future editing and export them as PNGs. May be in future they can directly support some kind of export as Html/Xhtml etc.

Here is a Quick Mockup I made in 10 minutes :)

Deadly Blow for Flex based presentation SaaS providers

Three months ago me and my friend Vijay were planning to build a "Flex PPT", which was suppose to be our product that would have allowed users to create professional Flash presentations (similar to PPT) and share them with other users, along with the capability of presenting them offline using Adobe AIR.

We were aware of SlideRocket one of SaaS provider facilitating such features, we were very confident that we could have added more features and other interesting out of box features, but it so happened that I came across Live-Documents from IntraColl co-founded by Sabeer Bhatia (yes the co-founder of Hot Mail!), this was almost exactly the same thing that we had in mind, (but definitely Live-Documents is very professional then what we could have done with just 2 people using some open source frameworks like degrafa, GDS etc ). Hence we decided to drop that plan right then, especially the social integration was the main "out of box" feature we wanted to add to our "Flex PPT", which we thought was missing in SlideRocket.

Any way we were happy to see that at least our idea was worth becoming reality :)

Now let’s talk about the deadly blow from adobe, looks like both Slide Rocket and Live-documents are going to face the wrath of Adobe as it’s coming up with a similar SaaS known as Acrobat.com Presentations, thou it’s still in Adobe labs, I am sure it will be pretty famous soon, this must have surely sent some shock waves to Microsoft as they are going to have a really tough competitors to face.

Actually there is a wonderful comparison page provide by Live-Documents comparing Microsoft PPT , Google Docs and Slide Rocket, and I think it’s time for them to update that list by adding Acrobat.com Presentations.

Personally I am very proud and happy to see some niche and high quality product start-ups popping out in India, and whole heartedly wish any new start-ups “All the very Best”.