Which tool do you use to draw simple diagrams/pictures to illustrate a technical point?

Question

Which tool do you use to draw simple diagrams/pictures to illustrate a technical point in a document?

Answer 1

I personally love OmniGraffle, but you may want to check out this thread for other suggestions. Although it's all UML software, most of them can draw pretty diagrams and pictures.

Answer 2

OmniGraffle on OS X

http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/OmniGraffle/

Or, the whitebaord :)

Answer 3

If you're on Windows, with the office suite, I would use Visio. If you're on linux and no money, xfig.

Other than that, most Office packages have some kind of drawing tool, you can for example do basic vector drawings in MS Word.

Answer 4

Haven't found anything that comes close to Microsoft's Visio (in a Windows environment)...

Answer 5

Depending on the document, I've used PowerPoint, Paint.NET, and Inkscape.

Answer 6

Mostly whiteboard for simple explanations and design brainstorming maybe coupled with a cell phone camera if I want to save it.

For some things Inkscape is great and fun to use though there's a learning curve. Maybe google's version of powerpoint.

I've yet to find a UML sketching program that I enjoy using, I've tried ArgoUML and found it confusing and clunky (jvm - ugh) and CadifraUML which seemed to just have too few options.

Answer 7

I use Visio almost exclusively for this, but Visio can easily become the programmer's version of PowerPoint if you let it.

My boss used Mind Maps for this sort of thing, which worked well below a certain level of complexity when they became too burdensome.

Answer 8

Pencil and paper.

Answer 9

http://www.graphviz.org/ turns a source-code like description into a diagram. It's quite easy to generate the code it needs from a database, or whatever other source you have.

Randomly I double clicked on a graphviz file on my Mac and it loaded into OmniGraffle which drew the same diagram that graphviz would have done, except that I could edit it. Anyway, it's a useful tool for drawing diagrams from machine sources.

Answer 10

PowerPoint now has (many of) the Visio objects, so I just use that.

Answer 11

For a simple diagram in a document, I use OpenOffice Draw.

1. It's free.
2. It's reasonably simple in terms of user interface.
3. It's fairly lightweight in terms of memory and disk footprint.
4. It runs on the platforms that I use for software development and writing documents about said development (i.e., Windows and several flavors of Linux).
5. It exports the document and image formats that I use regularly (i.e., JPEG and PDF).
6. It's free (see point 1).

Answer 12

For free-form drawing on a screen use a tablet PC or a Wacom tablet. Microsoft OneNote is great with tablets (recognizes handwriting).

Answer 13

Electronic white board You're only limited by your hand-eye coordination, then you save the drawing as an image file.

Answer 14

aiSee or GIMP.

Answer 15

Yed graph editing app has helped a lot where i work.

Using Java QuicklLaunch it's always ready to go :)

Answer 16

Good old Windows Paint. There are lots of things you can do with it that might not be obvious.