I’ve recently work in research projects that focus on porting an application to run on Android platform. Initially, this project only runs on the Linux operating system. This project called SAJE (System Aware Java Environment). Yes, it uses Java as programming language. I’ve decided to use Eclipse IDE because it has the plugins that I need, ADT (Android Development Tools) and CDT (C/C++ Development Tools) since partially SAJE use JNI (Java Native Interface) on it.
I use Pencil with android-ui-utils package installed to design the UI of Saje2Droid (the SAJE project that will be running on Android platform). The ADT has a nice feature too like Graphical Layout tools while editing Android layout. So what is Pencil? from its homepage:
“The Pencil Project’s unique mission is to build a free and opensource tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping that everyone can use.”
It comes in two different release, a Firefox extension and a standalone application. When I write this blog, the latest version released of Pencil is 1.2 build 0. Why should I use Pencil?
Top features:
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
Object snapping
Sketchy Stencil
And much more…
And also, it’s free :^)
Licensing and Versions:
Pencil will always be free as it is released under the GPL version 2 and is available for virtually all platforms that Firefox 3 can run. The first version of Pencil is tested against GNU/Linux 2.6 (Fedora, Ubuntu and Arch) with GTK+, Windows XP and Windows Vista/7.
This is the screenshot of Saje2Droid UI prototype that I make using Pencil tools,
Sorry, image link is broken/not restored