Re: How much like Visio?

[Cyrille Chepelov <chepelov calixo net>]

Le mar, jui 31, 2001, à 01:01:46 +0200, Christer Folkesson (PAC) a écrit:
> Hi,
> I'm  trying to find an alternative for Island Draw to be the standard tool for Unix users.
> Visio is a popular tool in the Windows environment. In some text and comments it is mentioned that Dia 
> could be compared to Visio and there are discussions on how to import Visio files into Dia.

Currently, there is no real interchange possible. 

> How close are the functionality of Dia compared to Visio today?

depends on what you do with visio and what you're expecting to do with dia.
Have you just even _tried_ the software ? You can, you know, it's free
software. Please just try; we're not marketing nor salespeople (well, I
know nobody on this list whose job is to "sell" dia).

> How close are the functionality of Dia compared to Visio planned to be?

depends on whom wants to implement what. Personally, I don't care at all
about what Visio does, provided dia does what I need. It happens sometimes
that I (and others) do work on dia which is not geared towards my
(or other's) direct needs, but is felt "the right thing to do". We get
compensated only by the "fun" factor; in my book, Visio exchange qualifies
as between "extremely boring", "who cares?" and "wow, let's watch how slowly 
the paint dries". 

This is Free software (freedom, not price): if you need something, you can 
submit an "enhancement" report in the Bugzilla and hope it will qualifies as
"fun" or "right thing do to" to someone, or do it yourself (not everything
is hard), or pay someone to have it done. 

> Are there similiarities in the user interface also?

Please download the software and try it. If you're looking for a software
whose UI is a servile copy of Visio (I'm not being derogatory here; there is
a need for such programs, and from my quick examination, Kivio fits the bill), 
then you might be much better off with Kivio rather than dia.

Both programs are Free Software. Both are licensed under the GNU GPL, which
means that as long as you can find someone who is willing to let you
download them at no charge, then you can download, evaluate and deploy them
to your heart's content without spending a kopeck (you have a lot of other
freedoms as well). Fortunately, there is plenty of sites which let you
download these software packages at no cost. 

> Which are the ambitions of this Dia tool?

I know of no tool blessed with ambitions of its own. That said, my personal 
ambitions for dia are a general clean-up of the core code, support for "UTF-8
everywhere", and better i18n in particular (i18n only -- I'm bad at l10n) 
Then, I miss a few object types. And maybe improvements in some import
filters. 

I'm pretty certain that if you get other answers to your post, they'll be
different. We're not a company, we're just a bunch of people (which for the
vast majority have never seen each other), with different priorities,
different (and varying) amount of time left, and different sensibilities
toward this project and others. In fact, the very definition of "we" I use
in that post is hazy.... 

I hope I didn't scare you off. Whether you choose to use/deploy dia in the 
long run of not, we always welcome constructive criticism (and specifically, 
I do.)

        -- Cyrille

-- 
Grumpf.