Pencil – an open-source GUI prototyping tool for all platforms

Pencil is awesome. It is my goto prototyping and wireframing tool. I honestly like it better than the other tools with price tags that I've used out there. Somehow it seems noone knows about this, but its doing for mockups/wireframing what Blender does for 3D artists - providing a high quality open source tool that is usable by industry professionals. I hope pencil and their devs get more recognition / funding.

using it and thinking about contributing it for long. The team did really ambitious work of dumping XUL and rewriting it in Javascript + HTML. I was one of the first user of new version since they hosted in gitlab , i was astonished that they did the conversion from XUL within just around a month and already working since then.

I've been an occasional user of Pencil for 5 years (almost to the month). Really glad to see it moving away from XUL.

Been using this for a while in it&#x27;s various incarnations - this one is definitely the best so far.<p>Very useful tool for UI prototyping.

Pencil was my go to free wireframing app for some time. Great to see that they are updating it.

I had used Balsamiq to design the forms&#x2F;screens for a SaaS project for a client (collaboratively with them), and it was not bad. IIRC, response was a little laggy, which might have been because it was built using Adobe AIR (not sure). (I got a free copy of it from Peldi under their scheme for people who develop free &#x2F; open source software projects.)<p>Has anyone tried Axure (paid product), and if so, how did you find it? Another client that I did a project for, had claimed it was good, when I told him I use Balsamiq.

Hey everyone! Vim Girl here. I&#x27;ve just created a demo of Pencil! If you are interested in seeing how pencil works I built a simple page: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;KTcYMvENb0k" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;KTcYMvENb0k</a>

Pencil has many higher-res stencils now, but I prefer the old ones that actually look like Pencil drawings.<p>I have also given this to clients, to have them draw their own UI concepts (as a starting position &#x2F; way of communicating) with good results.

Wow looks better than balsamiq I will try this out at work.

Love pencil and started looking to contribute late last year. Unfortunately I couldn&#x27;t get it to build properly on MacOS. As a result I couldn&#x27;t get anything to run, and with practically no documentation at the time I eventually moved on. Hopefully the situation has improved over the year. I&#x27;ll give it another go soon and see what can be done.

Sketch, Axure, Balsamiq.... and I still go back to Pencil + Illustrator after all these years.

Very instable on Linux unfortunatly.

Did they really need Electron for this? Why not just make it also available as a normal web app with a URL?

apps made with i-cant-learn-the-proper-language-so-i-just-use-one-thats-not-made-for-the-job always feel and perform very badly. at least for me.<p>i mean they call out performance issues right in the first paragraph in the readme.<p>terrible world of half-assed pseudo-native applications.

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fiftythree.com&#x2F;pencil" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fiftythree.com&#x2F;pencil</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;apple-pencil&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;apple-pencil&#x2F;</a><p>Kind of already an established name in the Apple world.