Le Morte d'Tufte
Some days while I'm digging around through documentation, let alone having to sit through a presentation, I feel physically sad for platforms without access to OmniGraffle. Perhaps a type of volunteer effort is in order, pairing the have-nots on underprivileged platforms with the haves who'd be willing to help projects make their documentation diagrams not look like ass. Presentation should always be the icing, but at some point cutting corners really does harm the message.
Posted by drunkenbatmanJanuary 20, 2006, at 11:03 AM
Comments (23)
Posted by: Peter da Silva at January 20, 2006 11:49 AM
DON'T DO THAT
When I saw the title I was a bit freaked because, you know, he's giving a one-day course here in Houston at the end of the month and I was pretty sure I'd have heard if it was being cancelled because he was dead...
Posted by: Ed Gordon at January 20, 2006 12:08 PM
Your doc always scares the shit out of me. At some point your .weblocs must start looking like a thick, grey line. Good stuff though.
Posted by: Thomas Malory at January 20, 2006 12:30 PM
That topic made me fear indeed that Tufte might be dead. Where else might we get his Powerpoint is evil diatribes and comparisons of Powerpoint with certain totalitarian regimes.
Posted by: bonaldi at January 20, 2006 01:27 PM
DB, you really have to get URLWell. It does what you need, far better than all dem weblocs.
Posted by: stinksoup at January 20, 2006 01:44 PM
Dude, your dock hurts my eyes.
Posted by: Tobias at January 20, 2006 03:01 PM
The screenshot looks like GraphViz output, a programm to generate diagrams using a markup language. It's often used to automatically visualize class hierarchies and such. OmniGraffle is nice, but adding something in the middle of a big diagramm can result in a lot of manual moving around. And not everybody likes GUI for all tasks.
Alas, GraphViz has problems with overlapping arrows. As it is open source, volunteers are welcome to fix this!
BTW OG can import GV files :-)
Posted by: Charles at January 20, 2006 03:21 PM
On Windows, SmartDraw is probably the closest equivalent.
Posted by: Muriac at January 20, 2006 04:34 PM
Yeah, what's with your Dock? Is that just to keep it thin, or because you actually click those things? Either way, you're not working with Fitt's law.
But you know that, and you usually insist on good interfaces, so I'm guessing you have a reasonable explanation.
Posted by: mindflayer at January 20, 2006 04:50 PM
You try remembering the URLs of all that daily pr0n.
Posted by: drunkenbatman at January 20, 2006 05:25 PM
DB, you really have to get URLWell. It does what you need, far better than all dem weblocs.
Thanks for the heads up (always appreciate tips on apps), but: Of URLwell for Mac OS X will answer a few of the questions asked here.
Posted by: craigtheguru at January 20, 2006 05:32 PM
OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner are two of the best apps ever. I can seriously say that without them my life would be harder.
OmniGraffle in particular has so many uses outside the area of diagramming and charting. I think its one of the most versatile apps around. Gotta love it.
Posted by: Ben at January 20, 2006 07:06 PM
Yes, that diagram was definitely generated with GraphViz, and automatically from the source code. If you notice the URL, you'll see that the documentation was generated with RDoc (http://rdoc.sourceforge.net/), a documentation system for Ruby code, and if you read the RDoc documentation (how meta), you'll find the GraphViz output support.
Developers don't have time to draw pretty graphs by hand, even if they have nice tools like OG to do it with.
Posted by: Gort at January 20, 2006 11:21 PM
Developers don't have time to draw pretty graphs by hand, even if they have nice tools like OG to do it with.
If you have ever used OmniGraffle, you'll see it has auto-layout capabilities but making it look decent is much easier. I don't know about command line support, but applescript works.
Posted by: Roland at January 20, 2006 11:47 PM
In the URLWell post, you mentioned how nice it would be to be able to drag URLs to a folder in the Dock, but that you can't do that. Have you considered using a folder action, so you can drop URLs on the Desktop and have them move automatically to a folder in your Dock?
on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving these_items tell application "Finder" set the destination_folder to folder "LXVI:Users:roland:Documents:Junk:URLs" repeat with i from 1 to number of items in these_items set this_item to item i of these_items set the item_info to info for this_item if the name extension of the item_info is "webloc" then move this_item to the destination_folder end if end repeat end tell end adding folder items to
Posted by: Dan at January 21, 2006 11:23 AM
I'm surprised your site hasn't been firebombed by L'Académie française insisting that you correct the title to "La Mort de Tufte"...
Posted by: Chucky at January 21, 2006 09:27 PM
The Omni solution for them pesky URL's
Speaking of Omni apps, shall we turn to the unloved one?
The reason I love OmniWeb is the thumbnail tab view.
If you've got plenty of RAM, instead of saving webloc's for retrieval from the Dock, you just leave URL's open in the browser, and there they remain, visible with a nice thumbnail.
I've got over 40 tabs open at the moment. The ones at the top of the list have been open for weeks - aka stuff I need to return to at some future point.
(And I've never understood the "you want me to pay for a browser?" complaint. Fergawdsakes. It's the app many people spend the most of their time in.)
Posted by: Wes McGee at January 23, 2006 08:28 AM
Off topic, but who did that desktop with the pic of the girl. Now I suspect you did mention him or her before on these pages, but I don't even know what I'd be searching for...
Posted by: Peter da Silva at January 23, 2006 01:12 PM
And I've never understood the "you want me to pay for a browser?" complaint. Fergawdsakes. It's the app many people spend the most of their time in.
Because it's the app I spend a lot of my time in (I think I spend more time in Terminal, though), I'd have to buy a minimum of 3 and eventually 5 copies.
I use del.icio.us for my important bookmarks. That way it doesn't matter if I'm on my Mac mini, the XServe at the office, my daughter's Mac mini, my *book if I get one, ...
Posted by: David Lazaro at January 23, 2006 10:02 PM
You can command-drag anything to put it inside a folder in the Dock.
Posted by: David Lazaro at January 23, 2006 10:04 PM
Umh... Well, maybe not web locations, but files can definitively be command-dragged.
Posted by: John Laudun at January 26, 2006 08:50 PM
Oh, dammit, there's no e in "mort." Now I have to fix it for myself:
La mort de Tufte
I hate it when that happens.
I know you're being facetious, but I know I use projects that haven't started on OS X and Omni Graffle came bundled. I can't program anything but I could contribute diagrams if I knew who needed them. On the Jabber page you linked who would you contact?