[lug] my latest guilty pleasure -- Linuxhaters Blog

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Sat, 2008-07-26 at 16:13 -0600, Nate Duehr wrote:
> Again, I'm not a software designer, so asking me to code a replacement  
> for Visio is the open-source community's way of saying open-source is  
> not willing to take on the hard challenges, I guess.  (And I have no  
> problem with that... I'm not taking it on either.  But it's reality.)

That's not really what open source is about.  It's always been about
scratching your own itch.  That's why you hear a lot of "if you want it,
code it".  The idea is that the source is available to anyone willing to
scratch their own itch.  The problem these days is that the user base is
so large that the number of people available to scratch itches is a lot
smaller than those complaining about poison ivy.

> Every once in a while I open up Dia to see it hasn't made any serious  
> progress toward anything that can make complex drawings.

Try TGif.  Or XFig.  They aren't as pretty as Visio or other desktop
apps, but they do the job.  But they weren't designed for desktop users.
They were designed to get work done.  

Personally, I use Dia nearly everyday at work, drawing design diagrams
for software architectures that I'm working on.  I do very detailed
designs before writing the code.  Not for anyone else.  Just for me.  So
I can understand what I'm trying to accomplish.  And later, write
meaningful documentation based on that design.

-- 
Michael J. Hammel <mjhammel at graphics-muse.org>