DiagramPainter Pro

When you pay $24.99 for a diagraming program, you don't necesserily expect it to blow you away with features, or ease of use. You simply expect it to do the job. Only, in this case, it will make that job so much harder. I spent all of 5 minutes using it, and I can tell you.. I would be looking for a way to get my money back on this one.. My first impression was "It looks neat".. Then I selected a shape to drop onto the canvas, and I imediately became frustrated. 1. You can not drag and drop shapes from the tools menue to the canvas. You must select , then click on canvas .. (not totaly horrible, but annoying) 2. Once you've clicked on the canvas to form your shape, you can't simply keep clicking to make another. You must repeat step 1.. 3. The shape defaults to a graidient of two colors. Do you want a solid color? There's a small drop down where you change the color type between "Gradient" "Invisible" and "Color" - not intuitive at all.. My first instinct was to change the two gradients into the same color.. 4. The color selector has no "okay" or "apply" or any effect on the shape while sample the color wheel. The color is applied only when you close the color pallet. Don't like the color you chose? Repeat! And that's if you have a single solid color and not a gradient. 5. You copy and paste a shape, and it lands exactly above the shape below it.. you can't tell if it's made a copy or not.. 6. Want to move a shape? Select it, then grab the little floating box above it to move the shape.. 7. Want to change the text? If you try to select the text within a shape, you must have nerves of steal.. step a little bit outside the conturs of the text, and the selection tool attempts to select a shape and not the text within the shape. Or, if you're lucky, it will select a part of the text, then you can Shift+Arrow Key to highlight the rest of the text. Okay, maybe if you HAD to put together a flow chart because your life dependents on it, you don't mind spending 10 minutes for a task that should only take 3 seconds, and can't wait to burn up $25.. go ahead.. give it a try.. As for me.. I didn't even bother to check what other features it has or doesn't have.. maybe it's packed with amazing features that nobody ever thought of and could make the worlds most amazing flow chart.. I wouldn't know it.. because I couldn't get past the simple basics of designing a work flow diagram.

The app allows basic flow charts, but is underdeveloped in several areas. You cannot open more than one chart at a time and the naming / saving is not clear or labeled. Formatting is VERY basic and a bit buggy. For instance, you can select multiple boxes from the open chart and select a new color and it will only apply to the last box selected rather than all. However, if you select another box from the intended selection, it shows that its colors were changed. You cannot add space above the items in the chart. So, if you start a chart and then wish to add steps prior to the first step, you have to select all chart components and move them down rather than simply add space above. Lots of room for finesse and improvement. $25 is WAY steep for what you get.

I took a chance and purchased this app. since the only other app costs 100 USD. It works well no crashes, the lines join most of the time in fact all the features work well except printing. Printing is without features. just print, you can't stretch, shrink or center your chart on the page, in fact you don't even know if you are within your selected page size until you select print preview. which means your moving things around over and over, until it prints the way you want. in fact you can't even adjust the border or margins. I hope the next update fixes the printing issue..

was scared by old customer reviews, but i guess people only take time to write bad reviews… been using this for a bit now and all seems to work as expected, was worth my $25.00 the lines do seem to follow the objects when you move them unlike the one review said…. all though I wish they were easier to add initially… the only other gripe so far is the place holder text should be eaisier to get rid of when you add a new shape, or else i just haven't figured that out yet… should read the directions i guess…. easy to use I guess since I didn't need directions to do what I have so far!

I thought this would allow lines to be attached to shapes so you could move items around and keep the connections. Not so. This is less intiutive and harder to make flow charts than using Powerpoint. Don't waste your time or money, unless you like to make tedious detailed flow charts the hard way.

Very limited graphic - hard to use and navigate