unicornucopious

After a recent stint with Visio which took far too long to create some simple box diagrams, I remembered a post about a tool that allowed for graphical ASCII diagram drawing. A few of these exist, but when I stumbled upon Jave I started having too much fun.

Let's see what I can accomplish in a one-minute sprint.

 +---------+ export pil   +------+
 | gsclean +------------->+ psex |
 +---------+              +------+
                         +---------+
                         | libpsex |
                         +---------+

Great for e-mails, great for source documentation, and very fast. The killer feature for the above example is the Textbox Editor. Other features:

• Export to gif, nicely connecting the lines (or not)
• Freehand drawings
• Convert image files to ASCII images

There are several other puffy, never-to-be-used features - ASCII bubble fonts, games, a screen saver, and ASCII clip art - but these are all part of the fun.

The app is in Java 1.6. Cross-platform, yes, but I didn't appreciate having to upgrade from 1.5, just so the developers could use generics. Configuring Java on Gentoo isn't trivial, but that's hardly Jave's fault, and this may change soon now that Java is free.

Download Jave and give it a shot. I think this will be a part of my toolkit for some time to come.