Visual Thought User's Guide
[TOC] [Prev] [Next] [Index]
Chapter 1
Introduction to Visual Thought
What is Visual Thought?
Welcome to Visual Thought(TM), the multipurpose drawing and diagramming tool for anyone who needs to communicate ideas graphically.
At the heart of the tool is the ability to quickly and efficiently create diagrams. We refer to a diagram as a drawing that communicates information about relationships between things. The essential activity of a diagramming tool is drawing shapes and connecting them with rubberbanding lines. Moving connected shapes preserves the connections.
Visual Thought can do much more than create diagrams, however. It has a large library of general- and special-purpose shapes suited to a great variety of drawing tasks. It has a host of functions to perform precise graphical manipulation of objects. It has multimedia extensions that allow you to import images and record sounds to annotate your drawings. The flexible file-linking mechanism lets you attach arbitrary files or programs to objects, then run them. These features, and many others, make Visual Thought a powerful general-purpose communication tool.
We at Confluent have paid a great deal of attention to making Visual Thought easy to use. Unlike conventional illustration, drafting, or drawing tools, Visual Thought was designed to move ideas and concepts onto the screen quickly and to help people who aren't graphic designers create professional-looking graphics.
What is Visual Thought Used For?
Visual Thought can be used for a very broad spectrum of applications. We've found that these applications can be divided into three general groups: business graphics, engineering, and technical graphics. You will undoubtedly find more than the ones we've listed here.
Business Graphics Applications
Visual Thought's drag-and-drop shape libraries, intelligent rubberbanding connections, and emphasis on ease-of-use make the program well-suited for a variety of presentation-oriented graphics, including organizational charts, network diagrams, flow diagrams, and graphs and charts, as well as general drawing.
Engineering Applications
Predefined drag-and-drop palettes support the most popular object-oriented diagramming methodologies, including Booch, Rumbaugh (OMT), and Entity-Relationship. Or, if you wish, you can create palette libraries to support your own methodologies for deployment throughout your organization.
With the circuit and logic palettes, simply drag-and-drop components into your drawing and connect them up to create circuit and logic diagrams.
You can create traditional flowcharts, dataflow, and process diagrams.
Technical Graphics Applications
You can import images, record sounds, and link arbitrary files to objects to create on-line, multimedia training courses. The attachment mechanism allows you to click on buttons associated with individual objects to run arbitrary applications, including shell scripts, spreadsheets, simulators, or Visual Thought itself (thus allowing hierarchical drawings).
The on-line Guided Tour is a good example of a training course. It uses Visual Thought to teach how to use Visual Thought.
You can create technical figures or illustrations with callouts and export them as Encapsulated PostScript for inclusion into document processors such as FrameMaker. All images in this chapter were created in just this way.
Ease-Of-Use: A Central Theme
Visual Thought was designed with extreme ease-of-use in mind. You will find that Visual Thought is not a typical UNIX® application; its ease-of-use surpasses that of even most Macintosh® programs.
Central to the ease-of-use theme are the following components:
- Free-form, user-editable, drag-and-drop palettes
You can use the many predefined palettes to accomplish typical drawing and diagramming tasks, or you can create your own to suit your needs.
- The Inspector
This dialog empowers you to efficiently examine and edit properties of single or multiple objects. It saves screen space and minimizes dialog clutter while leaving all important editing functions at most one click away. In particular, the Inspector eliminates the hassle of clicking OK or Apply buttons to change object attributes.
- Multiple Undo and Redo
The 100 levels of undo and redo allow you to correct any mistakes you could make. Undo and redo also free you to experiment with your drawings and play "what-if" games with them.
- "Live" WYSIWYG, even during dragging operations
Make a change, and it is immediately reflected in all views, even while dragging objects. There is no need to guess what your object really looks like from a fuzzy gray outline.
- Many accelerators and shortcuts
All menu items have key accelerators. All dialogs are non-modal; that is, they can all be active simultaneously, and they can always be moved if necessary. Other keyboard shortcuts allow you to switch tools, change text focus, nudge objects, and much more.
There are many, many more ease-of-use features and accelerators that combine to make Visual Thought one of the most intuitive and productive applications available for any platform.
How Will Visual Thought Help Me?
Visual Thought will help you think visually. Information that you previously had to present textually, for lack of a good tool, you can now present graphically.
You will save time because diagrams that you formerly created laboriously with tools not suited for the task you can now create quickly and easily with Visual Thought.
You will leverage your investment of time and money. Even though you may have purchased Visual Thought for one or two specific needs, you will find that Visual Thought has many uses that you may not have anticipated. You need only learn the tool once, then use it for many things.
Talk To Us!
Finally, we at Confluent are always striving to make Visual Thought the best product we possibly can. We also aim to ensure that you, our customer, are always satisfied with the product as well as with our service and support. Should you have a question or comment about Visual Thought, please use the integrated Suggestion Box to communicate with us through e-mail. You can also send a message directly to vthought@confluent.com. All your suggestions are welcome. They will be read, and we will respond to you.
Have fun, and we hope to hear from you soon!
Visual Thought User's Guide
[TOC] [Prev] [Next] [Index]
webmaster@confluent.com
¨ 1997 Confluent, Inc. All rights reserved.