Comment by eatonphil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eatonphil | Hacker News Reader

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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, group them, connect them, arrange them.

Most other tools I've found when googling around require the same level of effort to use as Draw.io: AsciiFlow, Gliffy.

Omnigraffle is out of the picture since I need to be able to share and use graphs across Mac, Windows, and Linux users -- without needing to describe multiple tools and conversion between formats or anything.

The simplest tool I've seen that just works is Visio. It is primarily click-and-drag and has great suggested connecting, sizing, grouping, and arranging features. It has an online client that works in Chrome in Mac, Linux, Windows, and FreeBSD. On Windows there is also the fully-featured desktop client. It's also familiar/intuitive enough to old-school Office users and feels like a regular graphics application to those of us less Office-oriented.

I don't enjoy spending as much time as I have hunting for the ideal solution. But I'm happy to have found Visio.

Thanks for mentioning Visio. I work for the Visio team, so if you have any feedback pls lmk.

Mac. Pleeeeeeease support Mac! I'm a technical consultant who was given a Macbook for work and I have to run a VM to use Visio. We're working on spec'ing out a replacement technology that works on Mac, but none of the competitors are as good as Visio, and all of our clients expect Visio. In 2019 we've got a team of 65 people all ditching Visio (and our Windows VMs) and going with LucidChart or Omnigraffle because we need something that runs on Mac.

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.

Free hunter: . The problem you encountered was an "improvement" MS introduced in with Office 2016. They decided that Visio was a "business" product that home users could not possibly want to use ... <big sigh>! More likely, that home users could not AFFORD to use at the price point MS is selling Visio. . Initially, they made it impossible to install Visio (and Project) with ANY other Office bundle. OOPS! It took them almost a year to fix for business users. . Here are a couple of links from MS about installing Visio . https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Install-Visio-f98f2... . SUPPORTED SCENARIOS FOR INSTALLING DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF OFFICE, VISIO, AND PROJECT ON THE SAME COMPUTER – DIFFERENT YEARS AND MSI VS CTR. . https://technet.microsoft.com/library/mt712177%28v=office.16... . This is an EXCELLENT resource. Starting on October 11, 2016, Office 2013 software that uses Click-to-Run can be installed on the same computer with Office 2016 software that uses Click-to-Run. . We can also Use the Office Deployment Tool to install volume licensed editions of Visio 2016 and Project 2016 . . Note: The MAK keys currently available on the Volume Licensing Service Center (VLSC) aren’t compatible with this specific installation scenario. We’re working on a solution, but we currently don’t have a date when we expect the solution to be available. KMS activation is available.

Try Omnigraffle Pro - imports and exports to Visio.

I've successfully used lucidcharts.com to import, edit & re-export back to Visio.

Consider the case of a metabolic pathway. It's a diagram that shows different biochemicals, and they're connected to one another by arrows labeled with an enzyme.

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...

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.)

Please make a Mac version

Since you are on the team, puzzle me this. . The original creators sold out to MS back in the mid 2000's. Now MS calls it an "Office" product. . So why is Visio not included in ANY Office bundled offering? It is only sold as an overpriced standalone product, back to 1980's marketing! It strikes me as contrary to the key concept underlying Office! That is selling bundles of products cheaper than standalone competitors.

As this question shows, there are lots of free and low cost alternatives.

Visio (and Project) should be included in at least one Office bundle, ie Pro Plus.

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.

I'm a long-time Visio user (maybe 10+ years), and I also find it crashes way more often than any other Office product.

Bring Visio online to feature parity with Visio desktop! Demonstrated progress/goals toward this would go a long way too.

Sorry, that is not going to happen. (my opinion as an informed user ...) . The Office online (onlie <sic>) (cr)applets will NEVER have feature parity with desktop equivalents. The online applets are intended for simple use only. They can read and do simple edits on files created in the "real" desktop applications without corrupting features they cannot edit. . They are essentially a "bait and switch" tactic. Get you used to using the simple applet, to "encourage" you to spend money to rent Office 365 (their preferred product). Like "Office 2010 Starter" that came "free" with some computers, for a short time. .

Confused about your premise. I'm paying for service now. I pay the same price for the desktop version as for the online version.

I'm not trying to save money, I'm trying to ensure a good experience for folks who need to use Visio on Mac/Linux/FreeBSD in addition to the Windows users.

I love Visio. Good job.

Is there a way I can interface C# to it easily? Basically I'd like to add some intelligence to a standard Visio document to almost make it a schematic capture system. Even if that isn't possible, keep up the good work!

Please release a full client for macOS :)

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.

As someone who went out and bought a license and used it frequently for figures in grant proposals and other documents, Visio is excruciating. It's not even much of a learning curve, it's just frustrating and feels like you're fighting it.

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.

It’s an unusual, red-headed stepchild product.

Personally, it’s unusual in that it’s an acquired product that’s sort of an Office component and it has gotten worse with every release until very recently. Even Outlook, while awful, gets better.

BTW, Visio isn't the only Office component that was acquired, FrontPage was as well (both the client and the server-side extensions), and even venerable PowerPoint, which was Microsoft's very first acquisition back in 1987.

This represents my exact experience with diagramming programs. Over the past five years, I setup a virtual machine just to run Visio, at least 5 times.

Draw.io could be so much better but it is exhausting to create anything with it.

How is Draw.io different than Visio when it comes to creating our own objects, sizing, grouping, connecting, arranging them?

It was difficult for me to articulate in the original comment and still difficult for me to articulate now. :) Give it a try yourself, Visio has free trials. If you don't see a difference then it doesn't matter!

But it had to do with all of those items being very manual in Draw.io with little assistance. Whereas Visio auto-resized and offered connections and new elements very fluidly.

It seemed like it was taking me 20-30 minutes to do a simple diagram on Draw.io with good layout and sizing when it took me 5 minutes to do it in Visio.

I disagree. I found draw.io really simple and fast compared to visio.

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