Diagrams: A diagram editor for the Mac
diagrams.app
diagrams.app
Yes, it is missing. Please repost when it exists.
eventually everyone will find out about plantuml (puml) which generates diagrams of all kinds via a simple source file and wonder how they could ever live without it.
+ It's all plaintext. I love working with plaintext for all the usual benefits, so this fits.
+ PUML renderer is technically a free-to-download JAR, so it can presumably[0] integrate well with my Org-mode life.
Cons:
- Try to draw anything more complicated than three boxes and an arrow, and you'll be spending 90% of the time fighting the layout engine.
- It's even worse when you have your own opinion about the desired layout. No way to do that reliably, the result is very brittle.
I generally like it, but I'd like it 100x more if there was a way to explicitly pin some component to absolute coordinates. Or at least a better way for giving layout hints than soft constraints introduced through invisible links.
--
EDIT: A random idea if anyone is developing something PUML-like:
How about separating out layouting a bit, and letting me type in something like that:
A F G
B C D
E H
package "core" #A {
[something]
[something-else]
}
...
[some-component #D]-->[some-component #E]
...
--
[0] - Presumably, because I gave up on it after couple large-ish diagrams, just before my use has reached the threshold above which I consider Emacs integration.
It is especially frustrating when you add one item to a diagram and ALL the items shift around to completely new places.
Personally Draw.io is the best freeapp already out there (online based or desktop), but lucidchart for paid is great too (much better print capabilities)
I’ve been using OmniGraffle for this purpose for ten plus years. They’re gone downhill since moving into the App Store but there certainly are diagramming tools for Mac...
At this time we’re in the middle of the development. However, this week’s support really encourages us to work even harder on a perfect product. And we’re also very happy to have several offers from developers and designers who offered collaboration!
It’s great to read your feedback in form of ideas, expectations and questions. You can be assured we read them all attentively. Please keep on posting. We will try to give as many answers as possible in future blog posts.
We also got several requests for beta testing - we will announce the opportunity to apply for an upcoming beta phase via our mailing list, which you can enter here: https://diagrams.app/
Have a good time. Lukas
ASCII export, so I can put nice diagrams in comments and docstrings. Also possibly (assuming those nice diagrams are unambiguous) a parsing bridge which lets me convert them into data.
The screenshot on monodraw's home look good, might be what I've been looking for.
That being said, as a UX guy I always love to look at competitors and find ways how editing can be improved or streamlined (and yEd has many features already, so some parts of it can be more complicated than I'd like).
For yEd the lack of rotating shapes is a deliberate decision based on implementation difficulty (it's based on an older yFiles library version), workarounds are available (importing arbitrary shapes), and the fact that in a graph drawing application there are several things that don't play well with rotated nodes, such as automatic layout and ports. For yEd Live we are considering to add the feature, but we're still trying to figure out how to lessen the impact where things don't work well together. After all, automatic layout is one of our main selling points. We have already implemented rotatable nodes as a demo [1], so simply adding that to yEd Live would be trivial from a technical standpoint, but we like to care about UX as well.
Other applications may not have the same constraints (graph vs. generic drawing) or may disregard some of the problems (e.g. in draw.io you get overlapping shapes when you arrange a diagram with rotated nodes, since for the arrange feature all nodes are apparently axis-aligned and not rotated).
[1] https://live.yworks.com/demos/complete/rotatablenodes/index....
Are there any resources you recommend for learning to make good diagrams? Ie, I love documenting things but I don't have experience in drawing diagrams. I don't know conventions for displaying order of execution, what arrows should indicate (in A->B is A giving information to be? is B requesting information from A? etc).
Are there any good tutorials/classes/whatever on drawing good diagrams? Good at conveying information, but also consistent with what educated people would expect?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Modeling_Language
Check out interaction diagrams for what you describe. Two parties (A and B) would be represented as two columns, moving down the diagram means moving forward in time. The arrow going from one to the other is a message (either an actual message or a function call or something). So A->B means A is signaling (the text and context describe how) B. If B is requesting information, you'd have two arrows. First B<-A, and then A->B with the response (attempted plain text version):
t A B
0 | |
1 |---->| A sends data to B
2 | |
3 |<----| B requests more information from A
4 |---->| A responds
It's now as a website, but I have the server version and use it at least once a week to crank out interactions
With regards to what the arrows indicate, I've done dotted line arrows are synchronous, with a solid arrowhead meaning request body and an outlined arrowhead being the response. Then used solid black line with a single solid arrowhead for an asynchronous request.
The types of diagrams you can create is quite extensive: https://about.draw.io/features/examples/
and the diagrams generated are easily integrated into MediaWiki installations, with full editability.
draw.io online is a free-to-license web application for everyone. It is completely free to use for any purpose, there is no premium pay-for functionality, watermarking, or other limitations. You own the content you produce with draw.io and may use it for any purpose, including commercially. We don’t sell your personal information or data. We don’t store your data. You own your data and the application is open source.
Code here: https://github.com/jgraph/drawio
I'd advise you to post this again when you have an actual software to show, that people can test out. I won't sign up for anything and I believe a lot of people don't really want anymore newsletters and sales pitches in their inbox.
1 - https://codeyarns.com/2017/10/21/how-to-convert-dot-graph-to...
https://github.com/otfried/ipe
It would be nice to improve the interface a bit.
Because most decent Mac apps become shareware once they hit version 1.0.
Also, there’s no doubt in my mind that all these utility apps will be web-based in the future. Google Docs and Google Drawings are great examples of this.
Having said that, I wish you the best of luck with your project.
I think better on paper. Or I'm on the go and have to get my idea down.
Draw.io has a macOS version right now. Works pretty good, especially for a free program. Though it's clearly a port and uses some non-standard interface conventions.
To incorporate a GmbH company (which is similar to an Inc or Limited) you need 25k Euro in Germany.
The 90's are on the horn, they want to know when this will be shrinked-wrapped and sold at Best Buy.
Why is this even on HN?