[Sigia-l] Life after Visio

[David Carruthers]

>> Set your stage up for A3 and away you go.  The only thing 
>> missing is a  spell checker.
>
>Well, also automatic pathfinding connectors, those would be nice.

We've started using Freehand MX a lot recently, which has both of the above
and much more. I'm surprised it hasn't come up more often in this/other tool
discusions - ah, Ziya has just mentioned it as i'm writing this.

It sits quite nicely between the visio/flash camps pulling out the main
benefits of both without most of the complications. 

exporting to flash is a massive bonus - 
Creating links is a simple matter of clicking on the object you wish to link
and dragging the connector to the required page. 
If you drop the item into the library then you have a widget which can be
dropped onto any page and will maintain the link.

- Interactive sitemaps/wireframes are easy to produce
- libraries allow for simple updates to have global effects
- Global layers (rather than per page in visio) enable outputs for different
audiences/formats (flash/pdf) to be produced easily and simply
- Ability to export document as flash for quick prototyping
- Easy to use Background pages
- Ability to import library items from fireworks/flash 
- Sticky Connectors (the only real advantage of visio)
- More standard controls than visio (ie, shares a lot with illustrator,
photoshop, fireworks, etc)
- Far easier to use/maintain than flash
- Isometric diagrams are easy

can't do much very fancy flash work with it, but how much do you really
need?

dvc

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