Pencil some cool diagrams in FireFox
FireFox has always been a browser for me. Sure, it’s got a a lot of nice plug-ins which extend it’s functionality, but more often than not these plug-ins are usually enhancing my browsing experience. That was until now. In the pat 3-4 days, I have come across two ‘add-ins’ which take this to a different level altogether. One of them is called S3Fox, which is an application that lets you manage your Amazon S3 account, but it’s not a stand alone application. The other one is the one this post is all about. It’s called Pencil.
Pencil is a UI designing tool built as a FireFox add-on. There are two steps (as shown in the diagram I made using Pencil) to install it and get it going if you are running FireFox.
When you launch Pencil, you get a simple UI with a Canvas on the right and a Toolbox of shapes on the left. Standard ‘drag-and-drop’ for placing shapes on the Canvas apply, and you get all the usual features that you would expect from an application like this. According to the site, here’s what the list of features look 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…
* Cross-platforms
* Adding external objects
What is the greatest thing about it? It’s free. It’s completely free and it takes only a few seconds to install. It lets you save the drawings that you make on your hard disk, and it also allows you to export the drawings in image format.
Of course, as far as features go, its no match for a visio. And there are itsy-bitsy bugs here and there. But for a tool such as these the features surpass the annoyances by far. And it’s an ongoing project, so we can hope to see more improvements as we go along.
Although, what I like most about this is that it runs within FireFox, however there is a standalone version as well which you can download and run in case you don’t use FireFox.
Do you know of any other FireFox ‘applications’?