Diagrammr - create diagrams by writing sentences | Hacker News Reader

Diagrammr - create diagrams by writing sentences

diagrammr.com

103 pointsgnosis47 comments

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Well it was useful for visualizing some of Yoda's lines: http://imgur.com/OZOxG.png

This reminds me of something I once did with Poe's "The Raven":

http://img135.imageshack.us/img135/3741/weightedundirectedra...

http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/5436/directedraven.png

Works better as a sequence diagram: http://www.diagrammr.com/edit?key=dEWNUvFXUEy

it's also worth checking out

http://www.websequencediagrams.com/

i've found it very useful in the past. offers more features, which was crucial (grouping, notes). the theming is also nice.

This would've been useful in college. Drawing and labeling all the little arrows in Dia for classes was a real time waster.

"Kushal wrote Chartbeat to make it easier for people to communicate diagrams"

So it was originally called Chartbeat?

The reliance on Google Accounts makes me think they want Google to buy this out.

  The reliance on Google Accounts makes me think they want Google to buy this out.

It might be because they are using Google App Engine. I don't think any significant number of sites built on App Engine are trying to be Google acquisition bait.

Oops, typo. Fixed. I work at Chartbeat and have it on my mind a lot. :)

I totally agree. I can remember so many times when writing documentation where a little image like this would make things much clearer, but I didn't bother because starting up Dia or the like would be too much hassle/work.

> Drawing and labeling all the little arrows in Dia for classes was a real time waster.

Try yEd

http://www.yworks.com/products/yed/

What's this coded in? Is the source available?

It looks like it's written in Java.

By my guess, it simply takes the first and last words of each sentence and treats them as nodes while everything inbetween is a directed edge. This is probably then passed into graphviz.

actually thats what i found too... i typed in "how are who and what related?" and what you mentioned was exactly how it got rendered :D

Hmm, sounds naive. Maybe there should be a list of keywords that specifically create connectors...

Use <->, <-, ->, and --.

Example:

Fear -> Dark Side Fear -> Hate -> Suffering -- Dark Side

Fear -> Dark Side Fear -> Hate Hate -> Suffering Suffering -- Dark Side

You can also specify a phrase as a node by putting it in quotes

They might be using mscgen http://www.mcternan.me.uk/mscgen/ but I'm not sure.

Yup, it's Java, partially on App Engine, and calling out to Dot. Still deciding whether to OS it...

Please do ^-^

Sorry, what's Dot? Can't exactly google it :).

Part of the GraphViz package.

http://www.yuml.me/ is pretty good too, and the charts that it generates are much better than the graphviz-style ones (IMHO).

If you want to use a two word node you can surround the two words with quotes. It feels a little slow to respond but other than that it seems to work nicely.

ah yes! I figured that out by just trying it out :)

But I wanted to have nothing next to those arrows. Just the boxes. so i tried just 2 words and it doesn't work. Seems like there has to be some word to refer to those arrows

Yeah that is a downside. I don't usually like words next to the arrows either.

It will take an empty set of quotes for that, e.g. 'chicken "" egg'.

Or two spaces -- Obj1 space space Obj2

Thanks for pointing that out. That was my only complaint - perhaps the author should put that on the page where you create your diagrams rather than on the "About" page.

Otherwise it's a neat little app. Love the "How I Met Your Mother" reference on the example diagram. Great show.

Fascinating stuff. Although I can't come up with any uses right now, I'm sure it will come in handy. Are you using Graphviz?

This reminds of a time when I used a perl script to extract includes from my Objective-C app and then used Graphviz to visualize dependency graph in my app. I was going to make an XCode plugin out of it, but then gave up on the idea. Still, Graphviz rocks for this sort of stuff.

Doxygen http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/features.html supports Objective-C and many more languages. It generates lots of good information without its special tags, and even more with tags.

Doxygen can use Graphvis to generate dependency graphs. http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/diagrams.html You can also embed graphvis documentation (e.g. sequence diagrams) in the comments. Good stuff.

Yes, I was planning to play with doxygen instead of the perl script next time I get a free few hours. :-)

What I would really like to achieve is replace the file list in XCode with a dependency graph so that I can start thinking in terms of components - "where do I add this code next? where does it belong in my dependency diagram?"

I kept a sqworl of few diagramming tools http://sqworl.com/97021w

It's a neat idea, but a bit more awareness about grammar would have been nice. I tried, "Mathematics requires hard work" and it gave me, "Mathematics --(requires hard)-> work".

Edit: Ah, I see that items can be grouped together using quotes.

Neat idea. Imagine if we could use this to create more descriptive models and frameworks.

Projecting forward, you could model business processes or government simply by consuming and interpreting contracts, tax code, or law.

http://www.diagrammr.com/edit?key=dFE4tu7OUIr

My one complaint is that the the "embed image" link includes the key to let anyone edit it.

If you sign in on the front page, you can control access to the diagram better.

i tried including accents but they were shown in a weird way, take a look http://www.diagrammr.com/edit?key=dJdweCWOpEC

Awesome! If only creating UML diagrams was this easy...

this is pretty easy: http://www.umlet.com/

dup http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=789120

given hacker news lacks a search feature, I don't think it's appropriate to point out dupes (unless it's some sort of breaking news that is already appearing in the top/new pages)

and searching google for "site:news.ycombinator.com 'diagrammr'" is not a reasonable expectation for users.

I think that's a perfectly reasonable expectation for hacker news users

http://www.searchyc.com

I didn't mean it as criticism. It was three months ago, so it'd be fine to repost even if there was search. I just wanted to cite earlier discussion.

Sorry, I can't get over the incredible irony of a web application about English grammar not being spelled correctly. Someone has a good sense of humor.

The misspelling does make finding info about it much easier in search engines.

http://www.diagrammr.com/edit?key=d5D2oO1kz0N ?

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