What is a good Graph Editor for MacOS?

Question

I need some sort of node-graph editor, that hopefully works on both Mac and other platforms, to generate user created node collections with properties. The graph data will then be used in a data-driven application I'm working on, so kudos if the application can save the graphs in some easy to process format. So far I was using XML with a tree editor, but since the graphs can be cyclic according to the requirements, the tree editor no longer cuts it.

Plugins for other applications would also be ok!

Answer 1

Have a look at Yed (http://www.yworks.com/en/products_yed_about.html), free to use but places a logo on all output.

It comes with Mac OS binaries .. and you might be able to include ($$ required) the graphing engine it is based on into your project.

I've used it (with limited success) to document enterprise data-flows..

Answer 2

GraphViz' graph drawing software is pretty much the best there is, cross-platform, with a very simple file format and lots of output formats. It is especially good in automatically calculating a layout for graphs. A GUI for OS X is available.

Answer 3

You might want to do something with JHotdraw (at sourceforge). It is one of the design patterns demo projects converted from Smalltalk. It is (or was before it was put on sf) very well documented and easy to extend. A similar (but less well-documented) framework is GEF in Eclipse.