(Sun Microsystems, Inc.)(1997).iso/products/Confluent/images/confluent_96_blur_t.gif)
Confluent, Inc. * 400 Spear Street, Suite 207 * San Francisco, CA 94105
800-780-2838 and 415-764-1000 tel * 415-764-1008 fax * info@confluent.com
(Sun Microsystems, Inc.)(1997).iso/products/Confluent/images/vt_90_it.gif)
Visual Thought is a powerful diagramming and flowcharting tool packed with features. We invite you to browse the lists below!
Visual Thought provides over a hundred of general and special-purpose shapes, suited for a great variety of applications, from software design, to flowcharting, to network diagrams, to World Wide Web graphics.
Connections rubberband between the objects they connect. They can be straight or curved, and they terminate exactly on shape perimeters, no matter how complex the shape.
Add text to shapes or connections by double-clicking on them. Choose arbitrary fonts, sizes, and styles. Justify left, center, or right. Subscript and superscript. Choose arbitrary text colors. All text operations can be applied to the entire text in an object as well as to text subranges.
Set stroke, fill, and shadow colors to any color at all, limited only by the colors available on your system. Choose colors using the RGB, CMY, or HLS color models, by color name, or from a user-definable palette.
Drag-and-drop objects or groups from palettes directly into your documents. In edit mode, manipulate a palette just as you would a document. A single click then turns your creation into a drag-and-drop palette. Use palettes to save and deploy custom drawing templates throughout your organization.
Attach an arbitrary program or file to any shape or connection, then run it by clicking on the attachment button. Use attachments to create hierarchical documents, run document processors, spreadsheets, database systems, or any other applications with a single click.
Display images in shapes from GIF, Sun Raster, XWD, and other file formats. Images are clipped by shape boundaries.
Read sounds into shapes and play them by clicking on sound buttons. Record and edit sounds with the full-featured, flexible sound editor.
Grab a selection, a window, or the entire screen itself, immediately or with a time delay, and see it be imported into your document for manipulation like a regular shape. Makes documentation of graphical tools a snap.
The Inspector examines and edits single or multiple objects. It saves screen space and minimizes dialog clutter while leaving all important editing functions at most one click away. By being totally "live," it eliminates the inefficiency of having to click "OK" or "Apply" buttons to change object attributes. You will come to appreciate the Inspector when you use it and compare it with other programs' methods of editing objects.
Select or deselect objects based on their type. The Selection dialog dramatically speeds manipulation of multiple objects.
Copy a set of objects, paste a new copy of the set, and move the pasted set. Subsequent pastes of the set will align the sets in a regular pattern with the same distance and orientation between each adjacent pair. "Smart" pasting makes efficient construction of arrays of objects trivial.
Intuitive and complete Align dialog lets you align or spread objects in the horizontal or vertical directions simultaneously. Allows you to precisely position objects relative to each other.
Group, lock, and layer objects. Size them according to the text or the images they contain.
Exact correspondence at all times between the screen and printed output, even while dragging objects. Because you see exactly what you're doing, as you are doing it, positioning and resizing tasks become trivial.
100 levels of multiple undo and redo allow you to recover from any and all mistakes. Speeds your drawing and frees you to play "what-if" games, since mistakes are trivially undoable.
All menu items have key accelerators. All dialogs are non-modal; that is, they can all be active simultaneously, and they can always be moved if necessary. Other keyboard shortcuts allow you to change the text focus, switch tools, nudge objects, and much more.
The most frequently-used edit, arrange, and dialog commands are arrayed as buttons in the main window for easy single-click activation.
Zoom arbitrarily from 10% to 1600% of actual size with the "Magnifying Glass" tool. Pan with scroll bars or with the "Grabbing Hand" tool.
Have multiple documents, or multiple views of the same document. Each view can be scrolled to a different location and have a different magnification factor. All views of the same document update immediately as changes are made to any of them. You can use this feature to edit multiple parts of a large document simultaneously, or use one view as an editable overview and zoom in on another to perform precise editing.
The live grid sets snap points to let you precisely align objects during creation, resize, or movement. The rulers, with triple indicators, show you the location of the bounds as well as the centers of objects.
Choose inches, centimeters, points, or picas on a view-by-view basis. Text fields that accept distances perform automatic translation between units, e.g., if your default units are inches, typing "5.08cm" gives you 2 inches.
Export the whole document or just selected objects to a file, choosing from MIF (Maker Interchange Format), Encapsulated PostScript (EPS or EPSI), GIF, TIFF, JPEG, Sun Raster, XWD, and many other formats. Makes inclusion of figures or illustrations created by Visual Thought into document processors easy. If you have a translator to your own preferred format, just drop it in and Visual Thought will use it!
Choose from a multitude of standard US and international paper types, or define your own. Set dimensions, units, orientation, scale, margins, and number of pages. Visual Thought automatically determines which printers are available on your system. Why ever type the name of your printer?
Documents are saved in a parseable file format for easy interfacing with your tools. Use Visual Thought as a graphical front- or back-end!
Send Confluent suggestions, comments, or questions via electronic mail from the built-in Suggestion Box, if you have e-mail facilities.
Visual Thought is compliant with Motif, OpenLook, and other look-and-feels. All are selectable at run-time.
The large suite of examples teaches you how to use Visual Thought and serves as a springboard for ideas for you to generate your own documents.
Confluent, Inc. * 400 Spear Street, Suite 207 * San Francisco, CA 94105
800-780-2838 and 415-764-1000 tel * 415-764-1008 fax *
info@confluent.com
Please send comments about this web site to:
webmaster@confluent.com