Confluent, Inc. has announced a drawing tool for communicating ideas graphically. Aptly named Visual Thought, the tool combines ease of use and a broad application base so that users can devote their time to the idea they wish to convey, rather than to the process of graphically representing the idea.
Developed specifically to communicate information about relationships between things, one of Visual Thought's key features is the ease of creating objects. Another is its ability to provide "intelligent connections" between these objects, or connections that are maintained even when objects are moved around on the screen.
William Tseng, President of Confluent, Inc., noted that it is a "simple concept" that is useful in a wide range of applications. "It's got something for the business, engineering, and technical graphics user."
The difference between Visual Thought and other drawing tools, such as
CorelDraw, is that "Those tools are not diagramming tools," Tseng said.
(Sun Microsystems, Inc.)(1997).iso/products/Confluent/images/vt_screenshot_1430_i.gif)
For
example, consider how one would draw a diagram using Booch methodology in each
application. In Visual Thought, a user would simply select the appropriate
Booch symbol from a provided palette. In other drawing tools, the user would
face the task of drawing the appropriate object -- in Booch methodology, a
cloud.
Another difference between Visual Thought and drawing tools, Tseng explained, is that connections between objects snap to the perimeter of objects, regardless of how complex the object is. This eliminates the guesswork involved in matching up connecting lines between objects in other drawing tools.
And what if one wanted to move the Booch objects around on the page? In Visual Thought, the connections remain intact, regardless of where connected objects are dragged and dropped. With some free-hand drawing tools, the connection between moved objects must be redrawn.
This feature set is ideal for Confluent's target market -- the technical, engineering, and business graphics market. "We've got a large group of technical people using workstations. They're not graphics designers," said Tseng. "How many times is an engineer going to produce an illustration?" As another option, hardware engineers can use a schematic editor, "but what happens if you want to create a simple diagram? It's not that easy. And you don't want to fire up a schematic editor to do that," Tseng added.
With Visual Thought, users simply select from the appropriate palette symbols, shapes, and other objects specific to schematics. For engineers, Visual Thought offers drag-and-drop palettes that correspond to Booch notation, Rumbaugh notation, data flow and process diagrams, and circuit and logic diagrams.
Because of the easy-to-use drawing palettes and smart connections between objects, the tool is also appropriate for business users, who require ease of use and learning in a tool. Tseng, a software engineer, observed, "Engineers will put up with anything" in a tool; conversely, "business users don't put up with much."
Ease of use is enhanced through "true WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)" between the screen and printed output. This feature extends to live updating of the output so that the user can see exactly where a dragged object is being moved and how the connection between the moved object and other objects changes. The dynamic updating capability also enables users to change values of an object -- measurements, for example -- in real time by dragging a slider. "Very, very few programs in UNIX have (this ability) at this time," Tseng stated.
Other ease-of-use features include keyboard shortcuts and hot buttons for frequently used commands, as well as 100 levels of undoing and redoing of actions. Viewing options include zooming from 10 percent to 1,600 percent of the drawing's actual size, panning with scroll bars, and grids, rulers, and multiple viewing windows. To further reduce the learning curve, a suite of sample applications is provided to help users generate their own document ideas.
Although not a dedicated presentation graphics tool, Visual Though offers many drawing facilities for this purpose. Text can be added to shapes or connections choosing various fonts, sizes, styles, and colors; strokes, fills and shadows can be represented in any color, limited only by the user's system; and free-form, editable, and drag-and-drop palettes can be customized or created from scratch. These features can be used to create organizational charts, graphs, and network diagrams, Tseng suggested.
The range of applications for Visual Thought is expanded even further with the tool's "attachment" feature, which provides the ability to import images, record sounds, and link arbitrary (including executable) files to objects. The tool's "attachment" mechanism allows the user to click on buttons associated with individual objects to run arbitrary applications, including shell scripts, spreadsheets, simulators, or hierarchical drawings created with Visual Thought. Users can create technical figures or illustrations with callouts and export them as Encapsulated PostScript for inclusion in document processors such as FrameMaker.
Among uses for the attachment feature, Tseng suggested online multimedia training tools, electronic story boards, and online organizational charts with photos and sound clips of each employee.
A unique editing capability is the Inspector, which saves screen space while leaving important editing functions "exactly one click away," said Tseng. Dialogue boxes for editing the attached file, shape, position, style, and text attributes can be called into the Inspector by selecting the corresponding attribute button from the ribbon at the top of the Inspector box. When the user clicks on the "text" button, the Inspector box displays a dialogue box for editing text attributes that include font, style, point size, text color, justification, etc.
Other features include "smart" pasting, which aligns sets of objects in a regular pattern for efficient construction of arrays; the ability to align or spread objects in the horizontal or vertical directions simultaneously; and facilities to size objects according to specific criteria.
To run Visual Thought, systems require 16MB of RAM, 32MB of free swap space, and a color or grayscale monitor. A microphone is recommended for recording and editing sounds.
Visual Thought is available on Sun SPARCstations. Versions that support HP PA-RISC workstations are scheduled to be released by the end of 1994. The tool is priced at $1295 for a floating license and $695 for a node-locked license.
Contact Confluent, Inc., 132 Encline Court, San Francisco California 94127-1838, phone: (415) 586-8700, fax: (415) 586-8838, e-mail: info@confluent.com.
Michelle Pollace is the New Products editor for hp-ux/usr.
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