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>My favorite business graphics package is Visio. Now, I use an older version
>of it so I'm not sure if the newer ones are bloated or not, but I liked its
>drag-and-drop shapes, the hundreds of preformed shapes available, and its
>fairly simple interface. And it works exclusively in vector formats.
I'm using Visio Professional 5.0b (current as of early this month) and
it's still a wonderful program for flowcharts and business diagrams.
Very intuitive.
I use Corel PhotoPaint or Adobe Photoshop to create or edit bitmap
graphics. Since I'm usually creating graphics for the Web when I'm
working with bitmaps, however, I've been evaluating Adobe's new program
ImageReady (free public beta available for download at Adobe's website)
and am cautiously ecstatic about its capabilities. :-) It's very
stable for beta code, and it's designed from the ground up to produce
graphics for online presentation. Very nice.
For vector-based drawing, on the rare occasion that I need to do
something that can't be done in Visio, I use CorelDraw.
The CorelDraw suite is bloatware if you install it with all the bells
and whistles, but with an educated hand at the console during the
installation process, you can get the installation down to, oh,
150 megabytes or so. :-) (I remember MacDraw fitting on a single
floppy diskette!)
- barry
Barry Campbell * barry -at- webveranda -dot- com * 40.77 N, 73.97 W
--
[O]ne of the strongest motives that leads men to art
and science is escape from everyday life with its
painful crudity and hopeless dreariness...
-- Albert Einstein, "Principles of Research" (1918)
