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You know why they call it the cloud, right? It's nothing as high flown as you might like to believe. It's because the area outside the local network, the great and terrible interwebs, is always represented as a cloud in network diagrams.

So the "cloud" is an obvious term for networking people. But at its heart, it's complete bullshit. All you're saying is, "Let's pull resources from the 'Here there be Dragons' portion of our diagram!"

In logic 101, when we were all amateurs, it was allowed in the test to use a "magic" operator to signify that there was some logical step needed to get from A to B, but that we didn't know what the fuck it could be. Kinda like showing your work in math. Ifyou were on the right track and missed something, you'd get partial credit.

What did the magic operator look like? Looked like a fucking cloud. People need to stop saying, "We'll export all our needs to the cloud!" because what they're really saying is, "We hope to god you don't realize that we have no idea where we're going to get the resources we need."

Inkscape is a vector editor, and doesn't support automatic layout when you move items around. At least that I know of, if you can tell me how, you'll make me very happy. That said, I use Inkscape for making presentation graphics in Linux, but it's not really a Visio replacement.

Reddit had a thread on this topic a few months ago, which you can find here: AskReddit: What is the best Visio replacement?

Some of the better suggestions were:

• OmniGraffle - Great, but Apple only
• Gliffy
• Project Draw
• yEd
• OpenOffice.org Draw
• Dia

If I really need visio, I run it inside a vmware session but that is a bit overkill.

It all depends on what you use visio for anyway. Most generic diagramming can be done with something like yEd http://www.yworks.com/en/products_yed_about.html - it's not open source but it's free and very nice. And it's java so you can also use it on your XP box :)

For UML sequence diagrams, look at SD-edit http://sdedit.sourceforge.net/. Also java, open source and very quick to use. Trust me, you'll never want to use visio again for sequence diagrams.

For generic UML modelling and reverse engineering, maybe you could take a look at BOUML http://bouml.free.fr/

And there's allways Gliffy http://www.gliffy.com/ which is completely server-side. Be careful though, the free version stores your documents for all the world to see. If you don't mind your drawings being stored on somebody else's server, the $5 a month for the paid version (that also does private documents and unlimited number of drawings) seems reasonable.

Openoffice Draw also isn't too bad as a final alternative perhaps.

As for dia, it seems to have a lot of potential but for now text placement for instance is very un-intuitive (try adding some text to an arrow, you have to connect it manually and the positioning of the text is very awkward). These guys really need to step it up, right now it compares to a really old version of Visio and even then it isn't half as easy to use..

for visio there are challengers out there Javascript only Flowchart.com flash based Gliffy.com

Gliffy is a great web based Visio replacement. How long until this gets wrapped up in google office?

http://www.gliffy.com/

Check out Gliffy.

I don't think it can read/write the Visio format (yet), but it has other nifty features, like real-time collaboration. It's also Flash based, so you'll need the plugin, but on the other hand using Flash avoids the usual Ajax/Web2.0 quirks. Here's a demo video. Gliffy accounts are free BTW.

Check out Gliffy.

I don't think it can read/write the Visio format (yet), but it has other nifty features, like real-time collaboration. It's also Flash based, so you'll need the plugin, but on the other hand using Flash avoids the usual Ajax/Web2.0 quirks. Here's a demo video. Gliffy accounts are free BTW.

Gliffy: http://www.gliffy.com/
Developed using the OSS OpenLazslo, a development environment that targets the Flash player. Much like Adobe's Flex.

Thanks!

We currently have advertising on published diagrams only. (example: http://www.gliffy.com/publish/1001932/L )

We plan to have a for-pay premium version in the future, but we expect to always have a free version, too.

-chrisk

(Score:3, Interesting)

by vidog (83824) Alter Relationship on Monday May 22, @10:57PM (#15385157)

(http://www.vidog.com/)

...and it worked for us.

Our web based diagram editor:

http://www.gliffy.com/gliffy/

Very nice! I just had a quick go and it seems like a very nice little diagram editor. What are the plans for the future - pay version? Advertising on the site? In the diagrams?

Thanks

Chris

...and it worked for us.

Our web based diagram editor:

http://www.gliffy.com/gliffy/

Chris Kohlhardt
Co-founder, Gliffy Inc.