Myquestions

More often that not, you’ll find that there are more tools available than you actually need. The question is always which tool works best for you on a certain task. I stick to the basics. The tools that I use everyday are simple and standard, if I come across an interesting looking tool that I don’t necessarily need at the time, I leave it for another time (you should see my bookmarks!).

A few months back I bumped into this nifty little tool. Another invaluable extension to the all so loved Firefox. Its called Pencil. Pencil is a prototyping tool. If you’re anything like me, I particularly hate prototyping. I do it because clients seldom know what they want. And prototyping saves me the headache of you said and I said with the client later on. So i’d rather painstakingly prototype upfront to avoid ‘client invoked migranes!’. The various prototyping software packages available out there are prohibitively expensive.

So for my last little project I did the GUI prototype with this tool. And I found it to be very handy and useful. I always have firefox on my laptop, so when I go for first time meetings with clients, guess who’s coming along with me too, Pencil !! I can do a quick prototype with the client, though doodling would’ve been faster. Pencil will save me ink and paper! Going green is not easy!!!

Try it out and see. Once the eventual design is done, I can effectively compare with the client vs the prototype. And remember, when we do the cutups and CSS, we have another great tool used alongside, PixelPerfect, to make sure all is in order. Of course no guarantees with IE!!

I will be touching on CSS frameworks in the near future. They too save a lot of hussle, but some of the frameworks add to the headaches…