Rationale: high quality graphics are eye-catchers for the architect’S customers, and in some cases allow better legibility for readers . In addition it adds on the aesthetic side.
Summary:
a) To understand the state of the art developers of the diagram editor UI should have some experience with Omnigraffle Pro.
b) The diagram editor shall exhibit more control on positioning and formatting of diagram elements.
c) As en example see the comparison of a class diagram drawed with AE and with OmniGraffle. (see attachments)
Wishlist:
* Sizing shapes to the same size is difficult.Omnigraffle: if an object gets the same size (for, vert or both) during resizing, thin lines indicate that on all equally sized objects. Same is true for gaps between objects when moving them.
* Aliging objects while moving should be supported. Omnigraffle pops up with helper lines if objects are aligned at the center or borders. Alignment with the canvas center is supported the same way.
* It is annoying if one wants to align objects in a way to make connectors snap in at at 0° or 90°. It is not possible, because objects snap in at 2° or 87°.
* Re-sizing and moving feels clumsy, the object jump in coarse intervals, not as smooth as on the mac. (but that might be an OS library problem)
* Connectors end at the rectangular border of shapes regardless of the real shape.
* Re-sizing: boxes are surrounded with a thick hatched line. The inside line denotes the size, which is not intuitive. A fix would be to show thin rulers that show the real target size.
* Resizing multiple selected objects at the same time. Same should work for fonts
* Control over text in objects (right text for font size, line wrap and color)
* “Magnets” on objects to control the snap-in location for connectors
* Transparency of alternate images (PNG format) is ignored. Ugly if background is not white or symbols are overlapping.
* Control over line size, color and style for all elements
* Bezier lines
* smooth text rendering on-screen (faulty space between characters)
* Output orientation: Diagrams should have an attribute that will ask the rendering (e.g. eaDocX) to print it in landscape mode.
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