Ever feel like creating a great animation or drawing, but don’t have Adobe Flash or Illustrator? Or maybe you have them, but you know they will take forever to open and set up when all you need is a quick canvas to work on. These situations are where the free, open source Pencil application comes in. This multiplatform application allows for quick and easy animations and drawings, using both bitmap and vector graphics. It’s only real limitation is your talent and imagination.
Being complete robbed of any drawing ability, I can’t give a testimonial on how awesomely it can display my “art”. However, I have seen in interface with everything from a trackpad to a Wacom tablet, and it looks fluid and behaves as it is expected to. Despite it being in beta, the application is very stable and has never crashed on me.
There is a very detailed user manual, and a very active community forum filled with people that will aid you should a problem arise.
Related Links:
Pencil Forums
SourceForge Project site.
Development Wiki