SunExpert

Product Reviews, January 1995

Visual Thought 1.0

by Simson L. Garfinkel, Senior Editor

Visual Thought 1.0

If you ever have to make a sign, prepare a presentation or create some technical drawings, you can't go wrong with Visual Thought 1.0, by Confluent Inc.

Visual Thought could be the most sophisticated technical drawing package available for SPARC systems today. Indeed, it may be the most sophisticated technical drawing package on any platform -- something of rarity in this day when most Macintosh and Windows "productivity applications" can run circles around similar UNIX programs.

What gives Visual Thought its gusto is a simple philosophy: When you make a change, you see it instantly on the screen. Click a mouse on an object to drag it, and the object -- not a wire frame -- moves with your cursor, hiding and exposing other objects as it moves along. Click the mouse in the drawing window and start to drag, and "handles" will appear around objects as they fall within the selection rectangle. Click on a handle to resize an arrow, and you'll see the arrow get bigger or smaller as you move the mouse, exposing or hiding objects underneath. Change the width of a box containing text, and you'll see the paragraph automatically wrap to fit the current width.

Even if Visual Thought's features stopped right there, it would still be one of my favorite drawing tools. Instantaneous feedback is a godsend when trying to draw a complex diagram. It lets you spend your time thinking about the drawing at hand, rather than trying to second-guess what your drawing program is going to do when you let go of the wire frame. With Visual Thought, you really do think on your workstation's screen.

Instantaneous feedback is great, but it's also only the start of Visual Thought's impressive feature list. Simply put, Visual Thought is a drawing program with a vengeance. When you start up Visual Thought, the program displays a drawing canvas, a palette of building blocks and a feature called the Inspector. Want a square in the middle of the canvas? Drag it off the palette. Once the square appears on the canvas, you can drag it around or grab it by one of its handles to resize it. If you've ever used MacDraw, you'll have no problem.

Now let's say you want to title the square with some text. No problem. Just double-click in the square's center. A label appears, ready to be filled.

Once you drag a few objects onto your canvas, you can connect them with a curve or a line. Lines can attach to the center of objects or to specified attachment points. Once connected, the line sticks to the objects, even if one or both of the objects are moved. It's the simplest way on the planet to build an organizational chart.

To make things really interesting, explore Visual Thought's Inspector, the panel in the upper-left-hand corner of the screen. With the Inspector, you can change the object's shape (there are 81 objects to choose from); change its position, size, and rotation (in case you want the arrow to be exactly 3 inches by 4 inches and at a 47-degree angle); change its style (stroked, filled, line type, shadowed and so forth); and change the font of any text that the object might contain. You can attach files to objects, allowing you to have Visual Thought play sounds or open other applications when the objects are clicked.

The Inspector changes depending on what you've got selected. Draw a line between two objects, for example, and you'll have a choice of 14 different arrowheads, including white, black, hooked, single, double and so on. Want to undo something you've changed? Don't worry: There are 100 levels of undo/redo. You can even tell Visual Thought to select every instance of a particular kind of object (like all of the circles).

If you get tired of Visual Thought's built-in shapes, you can group objects together to build compound, hierarchical objects. If you like your objects a lot, you can put them on your own palettes and then share them with other people. Overwhelmed? Don't worry. Confluent provides 11 palettes; four are specialized for object-oriented design.

With Visual Thought, you can make a drawing that is as big as you want. You then print the drawing as a number of pages and tape them together. With the Page Layout panel, you can also set your paper size, the scale for the printout and the margins to use. Files can be exported in EPS or GIF format, in addition to the program's internal format. A "Services" menu allows you to do screen captures -- either the selection, the window or your entire screen. There's even a Suggestion Box, which lets you compose a little note to Confluent and send it to the company via email.

In case you haven't gotten the idea yet, I like this product.

If Visual Thought's gusto comes from its design philosophy, its power comes from two other sources. The user interface, application and object-based approach to technical drawing all come from the Visix Software Inc. Galaxy object-oriented application development environment. With it, Visual Thought's programmers were able to build a 1.0 product that has an amazing amount of features and is incredibly reliable: I could find only a few minor bugs with the program. (Other users might not find any in day-to-day activities.)

The other source for Visual Thought's power is Diagram!, a similar technical drawing program written for the NextStep operating systems by Lighthouse Design, in San Mateo, CA. To be blunt, Visual Thought seems to be a direct clone of Diagram!. While imitation may be the most sincere form of flatter, I was surprised that I found no mention of Diagram! or Lighthouse Design in Visual Thought's documentation.

I have used Diagram! for more than three years, and the program has been an invaluable aid to me during that time. Although Lighthouse Design will probably port Diagram! to Solaris once Sun's OpenStep partnership with NeXT bears fruit, OpenStep won't run on SunOS and OpenStep is at least six months away. For that reason, I can recommend Visual Thought without reservation.

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

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