Shapevent

I’m working on a node based editor for brainstorming. I often find myself drawing psuedo-UML on whiteboards and inside the flash IDE. I like UML but it’s often more than i need so I’ve slowly been developing Znode… which will allow the creation of super simple diagrams like these:

I hope to have Znode finished and open sourced in a week or two. The code is all pretty simple. Here is a short feature list:

Add nodes with text
Resize nodes
Connect nodes to other nodes
Zoom in and out
Pan
Save and Load Node structures (XML format)

And for phase two of the project:
Undo and Redo functionality

This is a note to myself about software design…

Simple software should optionally automatically train the user. For instance, a drawing program should only have a pencil tool until the user draws a line the first time, this then reveals the paintbrush tool and use of the paintbrush tool reveals the paintbucket tool and the paintbucket tool reveals, selection tool etc….

This is a vast oversimplification, but I plan to attempt to integrate these techniques in upcoming small web applications.