#prototyping

"With the power of the underlying Mozilla Gecko engine, Pencil turns your excellent Firefox 3 browser into a sketching tool with just a 400-kilobyte installation package. "

"In general, using the browser’s run-time as a prototyping environment enables ridiculously fast rapid prototyping. There are no deployment steps to worry about, changes are reflected instantly, and all changes are dog-foodable from the get-go. Prototyping is also entirely decoupled and parallelizable: that’s especially powerful when you don’t have access to the site for which you are making a live-patch, the backend code is obtuse, or when you multiple have competing ideas for changes you’d like to make. We actually use the same technique for prototyping new behaviors for the the Ubiquity code repository."

"Sketch Furniture, aka Furniture Made With Frickin' Lasers. Swedish designers use motion capture technology to draw chairs and tables with light in mid-air. Their sketches are then built out of plastic by a laser into real pieces of furniture."