By Darren Rolfe:
I guess Tim bounced this review my way because I work in the advertising industry, and deal with graphics, type and layout on a daily basis. Concept Draw 7 is marketed as… A powerful cross-platform software for business and technical drawing and visual documenting. As soon as I heard mention of ‘business drawings’ alarm bells started ringing! I must of missed the memo but invariably to me, that means only one thing. Flow charts – aaaaaarrrrrggggghhhh! And they are the bane of every studio operator’s life.
I have a love-hate relationship with drawing flow charts, or should I say business diagrams, wink, wink! I would love to give it to someone else to do because I hate doing them. You see I’m an Adobe geek through and through. Anything comes my way of an diagrammatical nature I instinctively reach into Creative Suite and pull out Illustrator.
With Concept Draw creating flow charts is a breeze, no it really is. Choose a suitable template and Concept Draw then provides you with a tool drawer containing all kinds of flow chart goodies. Boxes, shapes, arcs and even some I’ve never heard of that can be simply dragged and dropped onto your page. With Smart Connector enabled your cells sprout connecting arms that magically snap to adjacent cells. But, and this is the clever bit (well it impressed me) the cells can still be moved around yet still stay attached. This should make creating your initial structure very easy. Of course if your feeling creative you could go freestyle. To be honest I struggled initially due in part to my illustrator background I think. As you would expect once you’ve built your diagram of course you can go in and add colors, effects and fonts.
But as well as being a tool for business diagrams Concept Draw also has the capability to produce technical drawings. This could be anything from electrical engineering diagrams, building plans, maps, site maps, periodic tables, garden plans, office layouts, and if you’ve ever needed Nassi-Schneiderman diagrams you’re in luck
All of these templates contain a huge variety of graphical assets which should make constructing your plan very easy. It’s simply a matter of dragging and dropping the assets. Apart from the Garden Plans which is more of a dragging and potting action (sorry couldn’t resist that one!) Once you’ve completed your business diagram or perhaps redesigned your front yard into the modern day equivalent of the ‘Hanging Gardens of Babylon’ you are going to need to get your masterpiece out. With Concept Draw you can export to html, xml, svg, jpg, png, tif, psd and pdf to name but a few.
Yes, you can draw flow charts, office layouts, garden plans etc. in Illustrator but you would also need to generate all of the graphical assets, very time consuming and it would be a right pain in the proverbial. So using something like Concept Draw to create your business diagrams would definitely be a time saver. But this convenience comes at a price and it’s not cheap. $299 to be precise. I did some poking around and I also asked my good friend and fellow reviewer Mr. David Sparks for his thoughts. He recommended that I check out OmniGraffle which retails at an amazing $79. I did check it out and it seemed to do everything that Concept Draw did, and with change in your pocket. One other thing worth mentioning is that any drawing you create within Concept Draw is going to be rasterized. Meaning if you wanted to enlarge it there would be some loss of quality.
Another thing which bugged me was the templates feature. There are no pre-built templates i.e. ready made diagrams you can adapt. This would make things even easier to get you started, and also might add a bit more value to what I consider to be an expensive piece of software. As per usual Concept Draw and Omni Graffle are both available as demos.
Technorati Tags:
mac, Omnigraffle, Omnigroup, review, software
