[Sigia-l] Diagramming tools?

[Ziya Oz]

Will Parker:
 
> Personally, I find that Visio does far, far too much

What's the 'obvious industry standard' for word processing? Does it do 'far,
far too much'?

What's the 'obvious industry standard' for spreadsheets? Does it do 'far,
far too much'?

I wonder if there's a correlation. :-) Bonus question: Is there a
correlation as to why these continue to be perceived as 'obvious industry
standards'? Does it have anything to do with Microsoft, its trade magazine
cohorts, analysts and risk-averse IT folks everywhere repeating ad nauseam
that they are 'obvious industry standards' to the point of creating a
virtuous/vicious adoption cycle?

If in fact Visio is the 'obvious industry standard' and thus reflects the
current state of the art, so to speak, we're all in trouble. Technology and
design have moved on from wireframes, static pictures, site-maps, the page
paradigm, etc. That's so last century. And so inadequate in the era of fast
prototyping, interactivity, dynamic apps, Ajax, mobile devices, declarative
language driven UIs and so on.

> - More importantly -- what other programs can be used as field-
> expedient replacements?

I don't use either Visio or OmniGraffle when showing design: I prototype.
While I use both for certain things, they each fail miserably when even the
most pedestrian level of interactivity is thrown into the mix. To me, design
is about prototyping and neither does it remotely well.
 
> Dreamweaver CS3 will  have an improved rendering engine

I'm hoping that, over the long run, DW CS3.5 will adopt WebKit for rendering
just as Apollo has.

----
Ziya

Complexity is simple.