Keynote. It's really good at that too.
Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
101–110 of 218 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#102http://plantuml.com I've been doing a lot of flow diagrams and PlantUML has been invaluable. I specifically like it because sharing the flow means sharing some text, which itself is vaguely human-readable. There's an online renderer (bottom of the page in the above link), which means simple diagrams are also quick to create and view. It's got a few different modes that it understands but I'd definitely add it to the…
Demo of PlantUML text and diagrams: https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/demo_plantuml
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ray-tracing idea really sounds great! What setup are you using for this?
Really just a personal ray-tracing app. I coded it up in C# with an event-loop to update, and mouse-clicks emit a ray to hit-test against an object, allowing for interactivity. Then you can draw anything that you can programmatically describe to the ray-tracer. I mean, a scatter plot's axes can be drawn as cylinders while the points can be spheres, etc., which makes it simple enough to throw together from most quick…
Nice!
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#104https://balsamiq.com/
I use balsamiq all the time - helps me make diagrams with a sketchy feeling. It is designed to be used for the mockups only but I find myself using it for everything. You might have seen it used in (pretty famous?!) developer roadmap https://github.com/kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap or in some of my blog posts https://medium.com/tech-tajawal/rabbitmq-at-tajawal-c4eeccdd...
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#105I've been looking off and on for the past year or two. The scene is depressing. Or there is just no market for cross-platform applications. However I doubt that is the case as over time there have been more fully-featured, once-desktop-only applications competing successfully cross-platform. (Figma vs. Sketch for example.) Draw.io is free but requires you to do so much work yourself to create objects, size them, grou…
Thanks for mentioning Visio. I work for the Visio team, so if you have any feedback pls lmk.
Make it more stable.
Everybody in my class started with Visio, they almost all went to alternatives due to unreliability. Crashes with no autosave files happened way too often.
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#106I've been looking off and on for the past year or two. The scene is depressing. Or there is just no market for cross-platform applications. However I doubt that is the case as over time there have been more fully-featured, once-desktop-only applications competing successfully cross-platform. (Figma vs. Sketch for example.) Draw.io is free but requires you to do so much work yourself to create objects, size them, grou…
Thanks for mentioning Visio. I work for the Visio team, so if you have any feedback pls lmk.
This is probably a long shot, but if y'all ported it to Linux, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
(Or improve the feature-parity between the online and desktop versions, like the other commenter suggested.)
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#107Very surprised to see no one mentioning yeD here. It is _the one_ diagram making tool I go to, when I make any diagrams related to software development. The only areas where I had issues with it, that I can remember were: - "How do I teach it to make these halfcircle-circle joints of component diagrams?" - Sequence diagrams are a bit slow to make with it, because yeD not knowing their semantics and not doing much for…
yEd is really great! I stumbled upon it while googling about 7 years ago, and it was awesome even then (and it comfortably beat visio). What's even more cool is their (newish) online version, which means you can do all the diagramming in the browser and even share it conveniently.
Thank you to the creators of yEd - you've put together a wonderful product! If there is one feature I would like to see, it's the ability to bulk format elements and label fonts. From what I remember, that was just a tad monotonous.
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#108Shameless plug: https://diagramiq.com/ This is a product that I've been working on for the last 2 years. You won't be able to create those animated diagrams (yet), but you can create pretty much anything else: Flowcharts, UML, BPMN, VENN, server architecture and other unique diagrams.
Interesting. But, having no idea about the future pricing, I'm very reluctant to really use it.
I totally understand your concern. That's why a free plan will always be available for basic diagramming needs. Our pricing will be tied to advanced features that are not publicly available yet.
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#109I've been looking off and on for the past year or two. The scene is depressing. Or there is just no market for cross-platform applications. However I doubt that is the case as over time there have been more fully-featured, once-desktop-only applications competing successfully cross-platform. (Figma vs. Sketch for example.) Draw.io is free but requires you to do so much work yourself to create objects, size them, grou…
Maybe it's just because I haven't invested the time to learn it properly, but the one time I was forced to use Visio instead of my go-to, Dia, for a diagram I found it excruciating. Specifically I recall not being able to work out how to make it let the diagram be arbitrarily large instead of forcing me to cram it onto a single page.
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#110My go-to is Dia, for a few reasons: It's portable, it's open, you can import sheets of widgets for whatever you're doing, it uses XML files so you can automate diagram generation if need be, and it's simple.
However, I doubt anyone will make the claim that what it produces is beautiful.