How often do you find yourself, trying to put some information graphically into sense, but fail to do, because the software you’re using isn’t really nice to use?
Maybe you’ve never experienced that or have never needed to do so, but I have on multiple occasion and it has never been fun.
Being a fan of open source and free software I quickly found my way to Dia, but seriously this software is not fun to work with. The interface seems to be quite buggy and you can get tired by clicking and searching through the menus and then there you’ve all that mess with your objects…
Next up being a Windows user and student I can get a copy of Microsoft’s Visio for free. Well the interface seems quite familiar and the functionalities are fitting… but it just doesn’t feel like the solution, in fact the chaos still remains.
Today, I was browsing again through my RSS feeds and found that a friend of mine (Stefan Schindler aka Tank) has published his first tutorial/article about Game Development Design (it’s very interesting and should definitely read it!) and he was using some nice and fancy diagrams. So mentioning the diagrams on IRC he immediately pointed me towards the software he used: yEd.
Here’s the solution to my initial problem:
And for all the lazy people that don’t want to check out the site, here’s a YouTube video:
Stay tuned for more updates on my projects!
Given that yEd is made with Java, you can even skip the second step! Awesome application though, I remember when I found it at school and even the professors switched to it from Visio.
Right! And since it’s Java it also runs cross-platform. The only downside I’ve noticed is that the interface isn’t the most responsive one, probably also due to Java. ;)
Haha, cool blog post! Glad that you like yEd, I also directly fell into love, considering that I got so p*ss*d by Dia, which – I thought! – was the only open and Linux-compatible diagram software out there. I also remember searching the web for hours looking for a nice UML modelling software, but didn’t find something cool.
yEd however is easy to use and can be used for a lot of diagram types. If there’s something missing, you can extend it easily.
I was afraid that the UI would be slow, but surprisingly that’s not the case on my system. But yeah, it’s Java. ;)
Also thanks for linking to my 1st article of the Game Development Design series. :)