Version 5 of DesignerDraw has a more up-to-date looking user interface, with floating palettes replacing the old fixed selection boxes. It also supports color, and has some neat looking (IMHO) 3D-ish shading effects, if you want to use them.
DesignerDraw supports Drag&Drop text editing, provided that you have the drag&drop extension loaded or are using System 7.5 or later. You can drag text within a box, between boxes, or from and to other applications that support drag&drop (such as SimpleText). You can also create new boxes by dragging text to an empty space on the diagram.
Other than that, the feature set is pretty much the same as in earlier versions, although there are a few improvements here and there (such as you can now change font, style and size for several boxes at the same time).
Be sure to read the known bugs section before using the program or you could hit one of them and possibly lose your work.
Unfortunately, the program can not read in diagrams created by earlier versions. The method of drawing the boxes is completely different now and it would have required too much work to make it able to read in the old diagrams. (Obviously if this were a commercial program I would have had to have done the work to make it read the old diagrams, but us freeware guys can omit the boring stuff if we want to.) The old program stored the box shapes as pictures (PICT resources) and simply drew them at the appropriate size and place. It had no knowledge of the actual box shape - it only knew which PICT resource to draw. In the current version, the box shapes are still stored as PICT resources, but the program must analyze the picture information in order to provide for such things as fill colors and shading effects. If you want to know more about this, see the file on customizing the program using Resedit.
Since I've been working on this off and on for a couple of years, I can't remember all the bug fixes that went in. Undoubtedly, a lot of new bugs went in too since a lot of code has been added and changed.
If it can, the program will allocate memory for offscreen pixmaps, resulting in smooter drawing. If you notice that the window gets erased and redrawn after moving objects around, try increasing the memory allocated to the program.
Known bugs:
Sometimes when you click in a box to edit the text, the text becomes invisible, but the blinking cursor remains. If this happens, do not type anything or the program will crash. Click outside the box to deselect it and continue. If anyone figures out how to cause this problem to happen in a repeatable fashion, please let me know.
The program allocates memory for offscreen drawing every time you resize the window. When making the window larger, it is possible for the memory allocation to fail. The program will warn you and put the window back to its previous size. However, once in a while it will crash while doing this. Therefore, save your work before enlarging the window.
You can delete text from a box by dragging it to the Finder's trash can. (Provided you have the drag&drop extension or system 7.5 or later.) However, if you pass through a program window other than the one from which you are deleting text on your way to the trash, the program may crash. This will only happen when child windows are open, of course, since you can't have two document windows open at once.
If you create a box in one window by dragging text in from another window, the window where the drag started may not update correctly. You may need to scroll it up and back to make it look right.
Bug reports can be sent to me at 71340,1210 on Compuserve (or 71340.1210@compuserve.com via internet). You can send other comments or compliments (always welcome!) to me there also.
Permission is hereby granted for anyone or any organization to include this program in any freeware or shareware collection, including CD-ROMs and internet archives. You do not need to contact me and ask for permission.
