First off, congrats to the authors of dia! See, I get to choose which tool
to use to draw UML diagrams here at work: Rational Rose or dia 0.84. And
most of the time, dia wins hands down, in terms of ease of use and speed.
But there's a few things that, IMO, need improvement (I'd fix them myself,
but I'm usually a KDE/Qt programmer and not a Gnome/Gtk guy (or is that
heresy?))
* The polyline doesn't seem to work at all: ik get a line with two
endpoints and no other handles or connections.
* The UML actor's label lies below the connections on the actor, so if you
connect something to the bottom-middle connection point (like a lifeline)
that line crosses the text. It'd be nice to move the bottom connections to
below the text box (IMO). The change in actor_update_data (in
objects/UML/actor.c) is pretty minimal.
* It'd be nice if there was an additional connection to a lifeline so that
lifelines can be daisy-chained. I realize that more than one lifeline can
be connected to a single actor, but somehow this seems more natural
(changes in lifeline.c are slightly more complicated than :1,$s/6/7/g)
* The exported EPS files are *huge* (in terms of paper area). Some kind of
scaling option would be nice, although that would involve putting in a
whole range of export-to-yyyy configuration dialogs. And yes, I know that
I can scale the EPS files when I import them into something else. It's
just that I'm used to the ration between what XFig puts on the screen and
what it puts on paper and the ration in dia is *way* different.
* Just about every dialog appears as a child of the root window. This is
irritating with a window manager that does "smart" placement, since the
dialog shows up miles from where I request the dialog. Besides, the
dialogs don't grab the focus or put the text focus anywhere sensible. This
means that if I doubleclick on an object (a UML message, for example) I
get a dialog a million miles away; since all I want to do is type in the
name of the message and hit enter I do that, only to realize that the
stuff I type in isn't going to the text box there in the dialog and that
enter doesn't bind to any of the buttons in the dialog. (Um, these are two
different questions: why put dialogs on the root window and why don't
dialogs grab the focus in a sensible way?)
OK, the ratio quibbletext / kudotext is a bit large, but I'm still very
impressed by what dia does!
ade
(O yeah: how to subscribe to the dia-list? The dia-site has no
instructions that I could find)
+------------------------------+--------------------------------------------+
+ Adriaan de Groot + Project: FRESCoS +
+ [EMAIL PROTECTED] + Private: [EMAIL PROTECTED] +
+ Kamer A6020 tel. 024 3652271 + http://www.cs.kun.nl/~adridg/frescos/ +
