I don't think we need to argue. Alejandro's comment however raises an important issue: "what are Dia's competitors"?
I think actually Dia can live alongside online diagram editors such as
draw.io and formats such as XML/SVG have nothing to do with it.
The reason why I have used dia in the past is that I could not find any other solution for the following requirements:
- be fully offline (
draw.io & co fail this - plus I'm not trusting them with any work-sensitive material!)
- is free, open source and is not controlled by a company (yEd fails this - also
OmniGraffle, Enterprise Architect, Visual Paradigm, etc)
- simple, does not require learning a new language (graphviz and any other text->UML tools fail this)
- lightweight, but still fairly rich in features (libreoffice draw fails the lightweight requirement)
- offers a simple interface which is very easy to pick up (I tried Inkscape, but for whatever reason I was never able to get working as fast as I could in Dia)
- portable: works on Windows (my main requirement), *BSDs and maybe others.
I might be heavily biased towards Dia, but I have searched for a better alternative since I knew it wasn't being maintained and couldn't find one. Hoping I have not missed anything?
I think there will always be a need for an offline, open source, portable lightweight diagram SW, so I think Dia still has a lot of life left in it. Also it is nice to see that it is still top-search result for anything like "diagram open software", "diagram software linux" even after so many years.
Hope this helps,
Ed
Greetings, Alejandro Imass!
> IMHO maybe a fork is required to take DIA to the next level and separate it
> from GNOME even if you decide to keep using GTK and move to 3 or whatever.
> More than the actual graphics library I would look into taking the things
> that are really valuable from the current code and perhaps think of a
> complete re-write with React, Anguar, Ember or whatever. I would get out of
> XML and go to JSON and re-write the app into a React front-end with a
> corresponding backend and API. IMHO the greatest long term existential
> threat to DIA is not Visio or Omnigraffle, it's draw.io
Sounds so much NIH, I don't even want to start arguing.
XML (specifically SVG) is a solid base. You can do wonders with it, all that
is needed is an improvement in rendering (handling) of shapes.
There's very little need to be changed, only moved forward in the basically
same direction it has been always moving.
All your fancy "Angular, React, and shit" are just overgrown, uncontrollable shit.
--
With best regards,
Andrey Repin
Monday, December 3, 2018 21:31:34
Sorry for my terrible english...
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