Pencil Project Status and Community Support

[Jay Gates]

After reviewing the Pencil project homepage, forums, issue tracker and SVN repository, it seems as though the project is no longer actively developed (though obviously there has been a minimal level of activity in terms of fixing some specific issues).  There appears to be little or no communication from the project developers in terms of project status or roadmap, and no apparent effort to recruit new developers/contributors.  There is no substantive community involvement (such as an active wiki, organized manner for user contributions of creative content, etc.). A number of threads indicate that users have attempted to contact the developers about the project status, but have not received replies.

And yet, when searching for GUI mockup tools via search engines and forum posts, Pencil is one of the most-cited solutions. Reading through some of the Pencil group threads, it is clear that there are a number of users who have extensive familiarity with the tool, including the ability to find work-arounds to unfixed issues and limitations. Pencil is multi-platform, is a well-known project and broadly recommended, has an active user base, is based on widely-available and updated technology (Firefox), provides a clear, valuable benefit unmet by more general-purpose diagramming tools, and is used in professional contexts (where people are, presumably, making money).

Based upon all of this, it seems reasonable to ask if the project should be forked into a more community-centric development model which would provide the following benefits:

1. Active development, including fixing long-standing issues and limitations
2. Public development roadmap, which helps to build confidence in the project
3. Encouragement of contributions for patches and work-arounds, made available in a more organized manner (wiki, etc.)
4. Organized method for sharing contributed content (may be simply links to content hosted on creative-content sites)
5. Transparent project management, including organized donations efforts to fund infrastructure and development, etc.
6. Updated documentation for developers and users
7. Promotion efforts to encourage use of Pencil in academic and professional contexts
8. Support resources (IRC channel, support partners, etc.)

Each of the above elements is a component of every successful open source project. Without any of them, Pencil will continue to stagnate, and become increasingly unattractive for adoption, even for personal use. This would be a terrible waste of the previous development effort, and a real shame.

I would really like to get some feedback on this from any developers/contributors, long-term users, or people who have considered using Pencil, but ultimately decided to go with another solution for any particular reason which this may touch on.

I would like to end by saying that I am extremely grateful to the developers for having created this project. I know that often our priorities change over time due to circumstances, and I'm hoping that, if they no longer have the time to put into the project, they will open it up to more community participation so that it will continue to evolve and be successful into the future.

Thanks.

[johnwrf]

Hello Jay,

I have been a long term user of pencil, before the project was taken over by Evolus.  I agree with your comments and also am very grateful for all the effort provided by previous developers.  It would be great to see this project revitalized and see continued improvement with this application.

Pencil is a great tool and has very useful features, but I think there are some core items missing or basic concerns that steer people away from adopting it completely:

- needs continued improvement - no major new features have been added in a while.

- speed and performance needs to improve - the tool performs poorly w/ 15+ page models.

As you state, an open source project needs to give people confidence that the project is viable and well maintained, so they feel comfortable in using it.

Please feel free to comment back.

Cheers,

John

[Jay Gates]

John,

Thanks for you comments. I've only just started using Pencil, so I don't yet have a feel for architectural limitations (including performance issues arising from larger documents). I don't have much knowledge about XUL as a development platform, and I'm wondering if there are some limitations imposed by it which might be difficult to overcome for an application of this type (performance and feature-wise). As I start using it more, I plan on looking at it from a developer perspective; perhaps there are some issues which can be fixed without too much intimate knowledge required. As an example, when doing PDF and SVG document exports, the resulting document takes default dimensions from a template file, with no way for the user to adjust these. It doesn't seem like this would be a hard feature to add (and it seems a little odd that it was left out to begin with). Things like that make me wonder how feature-complete the product is, but that is not necessarily a bad sign, unless there are underlying issues which have caused the developers to decide against investing more time in it. It would really be nice to have some developers comment on why development has stalled (do they consider it "good enough", lack personal time or interest, have moved on to other things, or whatever).

Jay

[Virgil Dupras]

Hi Jay, Hi John,

I'm a software developer in a free software consultant firm (Savoir-faire Linux, https://www.savoirfairelinux.com/, I'm a colleague of Emilien who posted https://groups.google.com/d/topic/pencil-user/GTe2Skm9LEQ/discussion ) and we're looking into unshackling ourselves from proprietary solutions for UX/UI design. Pencil is the most interesting solution we've found so far and we're interested in contributing to its continued development.

We make the same observations as you and we arrive to the same conclusions as to the steps to take.

So, we were wondering if you were still interested in going forward with your plan. If yes, we'd like to be a part of it. The way I see things, we could start with:

1. Create an organization and project on Github
2. Start fooling around and fix a couple of outstanding issue. See if we work well together and if the codebase is viable.
3. Invite new developers to the project by posting a new topic here.
4. See if we get a positive feedback.
5. If we get to a point where we can make a release, make further efforts to get in touch with the current developers.
6. If unsuccessful, find a new name and fork.
7. Build an appropriate infrastructure around the project for community-building and thus ensure that the current situation doesn't happen again.

What do you think? Do we start this yet?

Virgil Dupras

[johnwrf]

Jay,

Thanks for your reply.  It would be great to see development continue on Pencil Project, but as you, I too don't know why development stopped.

Pencil is a good tool, and with some improvement would be a really great tool.

I have been using Pencil for a while, but some of the recent issues are making it really difficult for me to keep using.

Cheers,

John

On Monday, May 26, 2014 4:23:18 PM UTC-4, Jay Gates wrote:

[Steven Grzywinski]

Just a quick check to see if this is moving forward... I've used most of the online "visio" type tools and anything available for *nix, and I keep coming back to Pencil... but I'm afraid to go "all in" with the tool if it is a dead project...

So just wanted to add my voice to the chorus.....

I too want to thank the developers.. and agree this is a a good tool begging to be great....

On Monday, May 26, 2014 4:23:18 PM UTC-4, Jay Gates wrote:

[Virgil Dupras]

On our side, we got caught by other more pressing matters and the Pencil evaluation project was stalled, but it's still scheduled.

[jan d]

Hi Jay (and all other people who replied),

The proposed ideas for moving further seem very reasonable. Have there been any new developments in carrying on with moving the project to a community oriented model of development?

Kind regards,
 Jan

[jan d]

Pencil dev is moving forward again: https://github.com/prikhi/pencil

[Michiel van der Wulp]

Good news: Activity is growing at https://github.com/prikhi/pencil
Please come and see.