[Sigia-l] visio feature improvements

Christopher Fahey [askrom] askROM at graphpaper.com
Tue Apr 15 10:10:10 EDT 2003


> Why hasn't Adobe or Macromedia entered this space?

I am pretty kick-ass with Visio, actually, but I have been seriously
considering switching to Flash as a wireframing/prototyping tool.
Flash's Symbol/Instance object architecture alone might be enough to
make it superior to Visio: I can make a sngle standard navigation
element (symbol) and create instances of it throughout the doc, and it's
much easier than Visio's bizzarro "document stencil". The basic drawing
tools (text boxes, selecting objects, managing layers, locking layers,
grid-snapping) are much easier to use than Visio's analogous features.
And on top of all that, Flash lets you easily add some prototype-like
functionality to the prototype: scrollbars that you can drag around,
buttons that go somewhere when you click them, etc. 

Two problems I foresee: 
1) Auto-connecting lines for flowcharts and sitemaps (but again, I
foresee Visio for wireframing mostly)
2) Printing (but I usually present my work digitally anyway, as PDF'd
Visio docs)

Has anyone else tried this?

-Cf

[christopher eli fahey]
art: http://www.graphpaper.com
sci: http://www.askrom.com
biz: http://www.behaviordesign.com







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