Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Get it here.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
Who gives a shit about free software. The guy has a project to get done.
There is nothing wrong with paying $60 for a very well designed and useful piece of software. Visio is a stellar product, which is why MS bought the company.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
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!
Star Office Drawing is as good as Visio for simple tasks. It's free for educational use.
...here, and get lotsa other stuff like Scribus thrown in.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
With all due respect to Dia -- it is hardly Visio replacement. Afew PVs:
* Having to go through 3-5 clicks just to change a width or color of a line -- gimme a break.
* Can't apply changes to group of objects.
* Annoying menu structure -- it is even worse than that of The Gimp.
* On Windows -- it's just too quirky and to slow (which largely GTK+ problem, admitted by the porters, hopefully will get better, eventually...)
One can use Dia if one has to -- but it really is *not* a drop-in Visio replacement.
Speaking of which -- with each new release it (Visio) gets worse...
--AP
have you had a chance to look at
ArgoUML (http://argouml.tigris.org/)?
- http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/e/0/6e
0 c5f5b-bb37-42bb-a189-bb66038fce2e/setup.exe
You're welcome.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.