Looking for alternatives to xfig (very old X11 figure drawing program that is a bit clumsy to use on a Mac with a one-button mouse) and OmniGraffle (not FreeSoftware), I found an interesting page via Google today: A German/English directory of useful free software for research and teaching on the Mac! Google pointed me to all the software using Qt3 as the basis. ¹
free software for research and teaching
I’ll report if I find anything that turns out to be useful. ;) There was also a lengthy discussion on EdwardTufte’s site on graphing software. ²
Hm. It seems to me that QCad is just as unusual to use as xfig. Still, layers for selective display (and not just depth) and multiple undo seem to be interesting benefits. What’s weird is that the company that produces QCad, RibbonSoft, is Swiss!
I’m just not sure whether CAD systems such as xfig or QCad are the appropriate tools for the kind of diagrams I want to draw (eg. WikiFounding or HowWikiWorks).
Maybe I should give Inkscape another try? At the time I did not feel comfortable with it at all. I just realized that you can download Inkscape for OSX as a precompiled binary from the SourceForge site. I still remember how long it took to build Inkscape (see CompilingInkscape).
Time passes...
Inkscape is pretty cool these days! Look what I did:
#Software
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
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Dia?
– Pierre 2006-02-26 14:51 UTC
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I didn’t find a binary ready to install, so I’m running `sudo port install dia` right now. I expect that it will take about half a day to download and build. ;)
– Alex Schroeder 2006-02-26 15:06 UTC
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Hehe, it took me a while to figure out that the default shapes don’t have any text associated with them, and that choosing the flow diagram library was giving me what I expected. This looks very interesting! Thanks for the recommendation.
And building didn’t take too long. ;)
– Alex Schroeder 2006-02-26 23:06 UTC
