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Free (as in beer) Windows Flowcharting?
bhtooefr asks: "I need a flowcharting program for use in one of my programming classes at Central Ohio Technical College, and I can't afford to spend much money. The instructor recommended that I use Microsoft Visio, but it's way past my budget (and I can't obtain it for free). I've tried a free trial app (SmartDraw), but I didn't like the UI at all. Kivio won't do the job, because the free version is only for KDE, and Kivio MP isn't free. However, if there's a Kivio port to Windows that is free, I'd be rather interested. Any ideas here?"
... I wrote that kind of stuff as my programming project in freshman undergrad. That was for Windows 3.10 though. Wouldn't help you now probably anyway.
Get it here.
How we know is more important than what we know.
But the el-cheapo educational version or get it from Kazaa.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Check out the gtk+ based Dia. You can find the Win32 version here.
MLT - simple and robust open source multimedia framework for Linux
you might be able to afford Kivio MP. ;>
I use Dia for diagraming and I love it. Of course I don't do anything complex or super important with it, so for all I know its not full featured enough. I do not know if the windows port is any good as I don't run windows, you can check it out here http://dia-installer.sourceforge.net/
:)
I've never used Kivio as I also don't run KDE, so I can not compare the two, although I am sure I will get at least one response that says Kivio is much better and vice versa
Of course this could be for historical purposes, but is that still done in schools? Some bad habits die hard, I guess, but I thought that flowcharting was dropped when Dijkstra declared "goto" harmful. Flowcharting has given way to pseudocode and for some UML (not that it shouldn't go the way of flowcharting, but every tool has its purpose). It's a very dangerous way of looking at coding, as it discourages abstraction, assumes a global data space (when scoping is essential to modern programming), and allows for arbitrary jumps from point to point (i.e. goto). Of course this could be all part of the lesson, but in case it isn't, I just want this student to know that there is so much more to visual software design. Of course, UML is popular these days, and for user interaction, there's the Visual Interaction Vocabulary by Jesse James Garrett. There are lessons to be learned from Flowcharting, but mostly about what to avoid.
If you're really wanting to do charting for programming then you probably want to do UML. ArgoUML is Java based and the recent versions work pretty good.
My Hello World is 512 bytes. But it's also a valid Fat12 boot sector, Fat12 file reader, and Pmode routine.
What about xfig and it's library of pictures. It has flowcharts and everything.
I can't believe people don't know about this program. It's great for all kinds of diagrams. I mostly use it for UML diagrams and E/R database diagrams. Being a programmer, that's the type of stuff I do.
Get it here: http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia/
It works with windows or linux, you just needs the gtk. And if you use gaim for windows, then you've already got it.
http://gaim.sf.net IYDAK
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
http://www.gradware.com/ProductDetailT.asp?Product ID=4237 sells for $69
and old editions are available for less than $30
Flowcharts haven't been a particularly useful tool for program design
since people stopped writing primarily in assembler.
And they're tedious and time-consuming to construct.
And they're out of date the day after they're created.
I had no idea that they were still taught.
Wait a minute. Didn't I say that on the other side of the record? I'd better check
Both MS Office and OpenOffice.org have some basic flowchart shapes and/or drawing capabilities. Look for Autoshapes in one of the MS Office apps (Word, Excel, Powerpoint). I'm not sure what flowchart specific stuff is in OpenOffice.org Draw though as I don't have it installed here.
DCMonkey
Star Office Drawing is as good as Visio for simple tasks. It's free for educational use.
any (compsci/eng) college worth it's accreditation should teach at least one class in assembly...
if nothing else, it gets you to understand what a compiler has to do with that awful mess of c code you wrote...
some people find some form of program flow documentation to be quite useful... a flow chart is one way of doing this... if you have a nice diagraming tool, it's not a huge deal to make them, and if you have the right level of abstraction, the flowchart isn't going to change all that much over the course of an assignment... unless you really screwed something up
Need a Catering Connection
I can confirm that the hitherto unconfirmed phenomenon of true, free beer does exist. I actually experienced it first hand yesterday in London.
All things in moderation; including moderation
...here, and get lotsa other stuff like Scribus thrown in.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
try dia, it's what works best for those kind of stuff, if I understood your problem correctly.
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
compiling KDE for X under Cygwin, then you can run (insert almost any KDE app here) in windowsm with a little work.
Dia has a windows version. Like many (if not most) free software it's a little rough around the UI edges, but it works and it's free.
-Adam
Mod parent up!
have you had a chance to look at
ArgoUML (http://argouml.tigris.org/)?
'nuff said.
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- http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/e/0/6e
0 c5f5b-bb37-42bb-a189-bb66038fce2e/setup.exe
You're welcome.Just do what I do -- run Knoppix, a Linux distribution that runs from a CD. Then you can run Kivio, Dia, or whatever. Knoppix lets you save files and settings to your hard drive with the "persistent home" option, which shows up on yor Windows system as a regular folder. Other than that, it doesn't mess with your system at all -- it boots and runs completely from the CD. I use Knoppix a lot, for those Linux programs that have no Windows equivalent.
I'm certain no one will see this.
Try TGIF. The program does take a little getting use to but I've used it, and it does work.
At least for me... Dia. What is especially nice was that I was using it to diagram a database I had designed, and I found a Perl script that would suck the schema out of a PostgreSQL database and make a Dia file out of it. I had to clean it up, but all the tables had been created and the links made.
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
You are correct about the global data space, but for just working out what do next, Nassi-Schneiderman flowcharts are cool, as you have to think about the scope of your loops and if statements.
Nassi-Schneiderman diagrams
How to Draw Nassi-Shneiderman Diagrams
In a quick search, I have not found any free Nassi-Schneiderman flowchart programs. I know that Visio included a stencil... don't know if it is still there....
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
I've used gimp extensively and find its interface to work quite well. It has a bit of a learning curve compared to other applications, but considering its function, it seems reasonable (and effecient) to have it setup as it is. Of course I am bias to it now, but I find other programs like photoshop to be rather cumbersome to use. Particularly because you have to go away from the image to perform a task.
Mathematician, n.:
Someone who believes imaginary things appear right before your i's.
Yeah, but my laptop won't be running Linux - it's hardware is a BITCH to get working with Linux, or so I've heard (Dell Inspiron 1100)
TCM (Toolkit for Conceptual Modeling)
I found it on freshmeat.net a few months back. I've done ER diagrams, UML, and even some network diagrams using the Generic Diagram editor.
Come on, wake up... stop doing what geeks always do and purposely not understanding the question because it would interfere with a chance for you to show off your knowledge and political bent re: software...
Don't follow the URI!!
I bet it will work.
...at least, until you want a feature it sports. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
And it will solve his problem. It's not as if I'm recommending that he VNC to a Linux box, now, is it Mr Smartypants?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Amazing how many people quote this crap without any understanding what they are saying.
First, understand that "flowchart" is a concept, not a particular notation. It is, quite literally, a diagram that describes a logical flow that includes sequences and decision points. Here is a sample definition. Search for "flowchart" and you will get hits on organisational structure, process management, Six Sigma, project management, and yes, software development. State and activity diagrams in UML are a particular notation for modern flowcharting.
Flowcharts remain a significantly powerful tool for various aspects of software design, especially user interaction sequences and state logic for UIs, as well as process modeling. They are essential in capturing conceptual business flows during analysis, as well as in describing algorithms in a visually obvious way (somewhere where pseudocode fails), even though they algorithm may not be implemented in that manner.
Flowcharts haven't been a particularly useful tool for program implementation for some time -- but they're still essential and actively used in design.
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
Is installing Cygwin+XFree86+KDE as easy as Next, Next, Next, Next, Finish, or does it take experience getting one's hands dirty working at a command line and reading code? Does it Just Work(tm) almost all the time, or does it misdetect the environment or otherwise fail to actually work on some hardware/OS combinations? Does the Cygwin layer introduce an unacceptable speed hit on the OP's computer? Do Cygwin, XFree86, and KDE take up gigabytes of disk space?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Switching from Windows to Linux may not always be feasible. I acquired a copy of a Mandrake 9.x series distro. I told Mandrake to install in a dual-boot configuration with Windows 2000. It autodetected my Radeon 9000 video card as a "radeon", but when I clicked Test, X no worky. Are you now saying I need to buy all new hardware just to run Linux with usable X11?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Is KDE for Cygwin considered mature enough to Just Work(tm)? Can it run on less than the newest, most powerful machines?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
On a related note, are there free and easy-to-use Gantt charting programs available?
Back in '89 it was really easy to produce and print Gantt charts using XML-like markup on an IBM mainframe. I had editor macros that would do things like change the expected end dates for a group of items, or change both the start and end dates.
Since IBM unplugged that mainframe, I haven't seen anything like that functionality. Everything is graphically based and so not automatable, or kludged up in Excel, or elderly shareware written for Win 3.1 in Visual Basic.
Visio is a great tool, and you can easily add and connect the components of your flowchart, but on the whole it is a mess having to then arrange the components to make the chart look the way you want it to be.
However there is a visio plugin that you can download here that allows you to automatically lay out the components in a visually pleasing way. Check it out, it's well worth the investment. (Yeah, I know you asked for a free as-in-beer tool).