We don't all agree about Visio WAS RE: [Sigia-l] Sitemapping and Macs

[Johnson, Bryce]

> - Few or non-existent keyboard shortcuts for most things you can do in
Illustrator,
> Freehand, and Flash. (I keep hitting the space bar to get the hand, or
the T key for text
> tool, or M for Marquee (box) - you get the idea) 

What CTRL-SHIFT-RIGHT CLICK for the hand tool is not intuitive? :-)
Yeah keyboard shortcuts are definitely awkward. 

> - Expensive - anywhere from a few hundred dollars to over $1k per
seat. 
> - It was never meant for this type of work in the first place and it
shows. They just
> keep packing stuff on top of it.

I agree with your packing comment but this could also be somewhat of a
pro. We use Visio because it is one tool that can do the jobs of many
tools. We replaced ERWIN as a database modeling tool, we are attempting
to use it as part of Visual Studio.NET Enterprise Architect as a CASE
tool (Rational Rose is about $5k per seat, XDE even more). We feel that
standardizing on tools is valuable to our organization.

Just to be fair to the people at MSFT your $1k a seat is for the
enterprise edition which is total overkill if your are just doing
wireframes and siteflows. Standard sells for $200.00. 

Bryce

I tried OmniGraffle on our Mac the other day and I am really impressed
with what it could do. It was easy to make things more elegant, Visio
could learn much from OmniGraffle in terms of how layers are
represented, intelligent shadowing and Styles.  I wasn't impressed with
it's Visio XML export however. The one time that I tried exporting to
Visio, when the file was read in Visio all of the objects were just
bitmap images and not editable. I hope that this was just the way that I
did this because that is not good.