The Renaissance Project team, part of the User Experience Project (UX) at OpenOffice.org, have announced that the Renaissance prototyping phase that began on the 12nd of June, will end on the 24th of July. The goal of the prototyping is to build "a flexible framework for mid-fidelity prototyping to test promising UI designs with real users".

The prototyping phase, to create a new user interface for OpenOffice.org, has ended last week.

User interface prototyping is supposed to be a creative discipline, where the tools don’t get in the way, so you can place your ideas on the screen just like you would draw them freehand on the back of a napkin. Up until recently, there was not a high quality open source UI prototyper. But,those days are in the past, though, thanks to Pencil.

Two weeks ago Project Renaissance unveiled its first prototype. The prototype resembled the Ribbon interface first introduced in Microsoft Office 2007, and the denunciations came so fast that few bothered to check the facts, or to give the idea any serious consideration.

Remember the OpenOffice.org prototype? Now you can try the Renaissance Impress without any installation (but you do need Java installed). Remember that this is just a prototype, only to be used to see how it looks. That being said, you can download the Impress prototype from HERE.

"Today, though, I'd like to talk about and propose a different approach to User Interface Prototyping: Emacs Artist Mode. Artist mode is a minor Emacs mode that turns an emacs buffer into a canvas you can draw all sorts of geometrical shapes on [...] Let me know how you are using artist mode in your projects..."

The OpenOffice.org team has been experimenting with a new user interface for the suite of programs, and they've presented the first rough prototype of this new interface, more specifically for Impress. The general gist? It's Microsoft Office 2007's ribbon interface.

The Pencil Project's unique mission is to build a free and opensource tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping that everyone can use.

Applications that use the GTK+2 library to provide their user interface have some very powerful user interface migration functionality at their disposal. With just a few API calls, an application can migrate its entire user interface to a different screen on a multi display host, or even to another X Server entirely.