[Sigia-l] Open-source IA tool in the making

[jacco at nieuwland.net]

Stewart Dean wrote:

>  Instead of drawing a box, typing a name on it then calling it a page why not
> just drag on a page and have all the attribute like template, meta data,
> title, etc all ready and waiting to fill in?  You could do that in visio if
> you where dedicated but I'd shudder to think how usable it would be. With
> omnigraffle, well if you group objects it can use each as a value - I've used
> it to assign template, page number and page name that is grouped when output
> as a outline document, but beyond that it's only really good for simple tree
> diagrams if you want to use it's smarts.

That's exactly what I've done in Visio. You drag a page object from the stencil
onto your sitemap. On drop, or after double-clicking it, a little property
window pops up and allows you to enter the page number, name, type and status.
Of course, one could define more properties. These properties are then shown on
the page object, and automatically generate links to either other pages in the
same document (subflows) or calls to a function to show a popup window with the
wireframe (javascript, only works in the exported HTML).

After you have used Visio for a while, created the necessary extras (good
stencil, a copypage function etc), it is actually quite nice and allows for
fast screenflow and wireframe creation, IMHO. And I'm not a big MS fan at
all...


Jacco