121–130 of 218 posts
Very 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…
I use yED, for quite some time now
Very 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…
With that said, it's just good enough for a free product, though it doesn't have any special edge over some of the web-based alternatives out there.
A very impressive feature IMO is automatic re-arrangment. Typical use case, when you want to draw complex activity of class diagrams when, e.g. following some legacy code, or just brainstorming ideas, it's easy to end up with a very tangled mess of shapes and arrows. yED has this magic button that rearranges the graph in a smart way, mostly based on direction of edges. And suddenly your diagram looks sane again. Kudos to them for this.
I'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.
Also you probably don't have control over this, but I tried to add Visio to my personal Office 365 subscription for personal use, but apparently you need a business subscription to get Visio? What's the point of that? I want to give Microsoft my money but they just won't take it.
I use Dia: http://dia-installer.de/ It's free open-source software, works on Windows, Mac and Linux. It gives great balance for drawing on grids (reduces arbitrary decisions) and usability (power to draw what you want). I've gotten several compliments at talks for diagrams made using this software, so I highly recommend it.
I used to use Dia. I now swear by Inkscape. Both tools are free; both are quirky and idiosyncratic. Once I got past the idiosyncrasies, I fell in love with Inkscape.
I'm sure there are other tools, but the output quality is great. It's expensive though. I've seen some online tools that replicate the functionality and they're awfully close but have even more quirky UI issues that get in the way of getting it done. I don't want to be spending more than an hour on a nice figure for a publication, and even Visio ends up taking me three times that.
I'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.
This is because I was using Visio where the final product needs to look aesthetically perfect, and the workflow would get you to 95%. But we all know how much manual tweaking it takes for that final 5% -- getting none of the text overlapping, making sure arrow dashes don't alias with each other, making sure colors can be distinguished, moving the logical structures around to get the overall shape and flow right, and so on. That stuff is pretty good, and I've only seen worse in other tools. But it's still excruciating.
Google Draw is awesome for this, you can search and add icons from the web, basic vectorized shapes, embeddable in other Google office products.
Google Drawings are convenient for their collaboration and ability to include in other Google docs, but I've mostly found that it seems optimized to produce ugly diagrams. It takes extra work to make things look lined up well. I use it for the easy collaboration, but miss OmniGraffle every time I do.
I'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.
In this situation, you often have several chemicals that can all be converted to something you want to highlight. When presenting such things in linear logical order for explanatory power you'd have all the precursors in a row and then have them all have nice arrows going to the product.
What I had the most trouble with was getting the arrows to combine nicely with curves. Consider something that makes it so that when multiple arrows go to a single connection point, it replaces the arrowheads with a single composite arrowhead. This deals with slight angle issues and color mismatches. Arrow labels were relatively straightforward to get adjusted right, but arrow bodies were not.
In this kind of diagram I also need to often pull a secondary arrow out of the main arrow to indicate a species that was removed, for instance ATP might come in and go out as ADP. This is very tricky to blend right visually, the arrows will be overlapping, they're defined to touch from the center of the secondary arrow to a point on the main arrow, etc. Consider a tool to launch additional arrows (casting both forward and backwards if desired) from evenly spaced control points on a main arrow?
Example of how bad it is when most people do it (this one is typical or above average). If Visio could to those right (don't worry about adding a chemical editor, those are just PNG or vector graphics from ChemDraw 100% of the time) it would make biology so much easier to present nicely.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6d/Wi...
Daft: http://daft-pgm.org
I also work with Turing machines and other automata/complexity stuff. I use TikZ for those purposes. It also seems to be versatile.
