Is Visio the standard for sketching software?

Question

I feel that my professional impact was biased towards Visio, as selected by IT managers and project managers. I worked only in Microsoft-oriented centers, where the MS Office standard.

Are there other professional stores out there using other tools?

Answer 1

A good current star product for the UI prototype is Balsamiq Mockups:

http://balsamiq.com/products/mockups

Another new and good choice is FlairBuilder:

http://www.flairbuilder.com/

Another similar tool is ForeUI:

http://www.foreui.com/

Answer 2

The boards are pretty good. Bad upgrade path though.

Answer 3

I either use my board or a great free software tool called UMLPad .

It would be really great if there was a good standard vector drawing file format so that these tools could interact. SVG is close, but IE does not support it. UMLPad, meanwhile, is doing what I need.

Answer 4

Yes, Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect is very popular. I used it in several places where I worked.

Answer 5

UModel is a very good charting tool, which I prefer significantly more than Visio.

Rational Rose is another major player in the world of diagrams and modeling.

Both of the above products will generally be more expensive than Visio, which makes them less widely used in all software development circles. There are also many small and fairly popular free alternatives, such as UMLPad.

Visio is only the most widely used, because it is the one that people tend to strive for their acquaintance with Microsoft Office, and not generally, because it is the best product there (far from it, in my opinion). I would not call it a standard other than the standard de facto because of its high numbers.

Answer 6

I used Smartdraw during my college, and I really like it, but in the company I work for, we use all Microsoft stuff.

Answer 7

Assuming you are talking about UML diagrams, I have not worked professionally with anyone, but I find that different diagrams work well for different diagrams.

I prefer ArgoUML for class diagrams, UMLet sequence diagrams for deployment, and component diagrams Activity diagram diagram

This covers the charts that I spend most of my time.

I find that UMLet and Dia are easy to use and have collected almost all the diagrams I need, and ArgoUML has additional functions that help with specific diagrams, and also provides code generation from class diagrams.

I also used Borland Together, and its robin round functions are good, it was very difficult for me to work if you did not use it as Borland assumed, which often becomes disappointing.

Answer 8

You might want to try Lovely Charts , if you are doing something fairly lightweight, their free version might work for you.

For flowcharts, I love bubbl.us

Both of them are in flash memory.

Answer 9

+1 for ForeUI, theme switching + DHTML interactive modeling, really powerful and convenient.