Came across an interesting project today: Pencil. Pencil is a GUI prototyping and simple sketching plugin for Firefox (released under the GPL.) According to the website: The Pencil Project’s unique mission is to build a free and opensource tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping that everyone can use.
Features include:
- Built-in stencils for diagraming and prototyping
- Multi-page documents with background page
- On-screen text editing with rich-text support
- PNG rasterizing
- Undo/redo support
- User-defined stencils
- Standard drawing operations: alignment, z-ordering, scaling, rotation
- Cross-platform
As a free option it seems to compete quite well with the likes of Visio, Omnigraffle, Axure, iRise etc, – especially considering its cost. Whilst it lacks some of the more advanced features of its competitors it seems to have great potential, even at version 1.1.
Have a look at it here