Kaleidagraph will be the death of me.
May. 27th, 2003 07:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
baratronAs mentioned previously in this journal, Kaleidagraph is perhaps the most powerful "point and click" graphing program available. It can handle enormous amounts of data, and mostly is easy to use. However, it's been ported from the Mac, and thus has a couple of violently frustrating idiosyncrasies:
(a) it doesn't recognise any of the standard Windows keyboard shortcuts, like ctrl-c and ctrl-z. Argh, I can't live without my Undo key!
(b) its "please wait" icon is the crappy wristwatch icon from the ancient Macs we used years ago, which brings back Horrible Memories.
(c) a lot of the button graphics haven't been changed since the Windows 3.1 version six years ago. So you have a tiny, black-and-white, entirely non-representative vague schematic, with no mouse-over help text, giving you no bloody idea what anything does until you read the entire help file.
Okay, for an example: What do you think a picture of a small box overlapping a slightly larger one means? Both boxes are empty. My guess was that it was the box drawing tool, or maybe the "insert object" tool. It turns out to be, in fact, the Zoom tool. There is no arrow between the small box and the large box to say "small going to large", or anything sensible like that - they're just two boxes, slightly overlapping. Now, I thought the magnifying glass for "Zoom" was an absolutely standard part of UIs, but obviously not in Kaleidagraph land.
In other news, my alphabet-shaped frozen potato products managed to glue themselves to the grill pan, resulting in Tragic Loss of Crispy Coating, so either this batch of Alphabites or the grill pan itself is defective - I haven't worked out which yet. And I need to stop prodding Kaleidagraph and get some sleeep.
(a) it doesn't recognise any of the standard Windows keyboard shortcuts, like ctrl-c and ctrl-z. Argh, I can't live without my Undo key!
(b) its "please wait" icon is the crappy wristwatch icon from the ancient Macs we used years ago, which brings back Horrible Memories.
(c) a lot of the button graphics haven't been changed since the Windows 3.1 version six years ago. So you have a tiny, black-and-white, entirely non-representative vague schematic, with no mouse-over help text, giving you no bloody idea what anything does until you read the entire help file.
Okay, for an example: What do you think a picture of a small box overlapping a slightly larger one means? Both boxes are empty. My guess was that it was the box drawing tool, or maybe the "insert object" tool. It turns out to be, in fact, the Zoom tool. There is no arrow between the small box and the large box to say "small going to large", or anything sensible like that - they're just two boxes, slightly overlapping. Now, I thought the magnifying glass for "Zoom" was an absolutely standard part of UIs, but obviously not in Kaleidagraph land.
In other news, my alphabet-shaped frozen potato products managed to glue themselves to the grill pan, resulting in Tragic Loss of Crispy Coating, so either this batch of Alphabites or the grill pan itself is defective - I haven't worked out which yet. And I need to stop prodding Kaleidagraph and get some sleeep.
no subject
Date: 2003-05-27 01:00 am (UTC)http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia/
no subject
Date: 2003-05-27 08:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-05-27 09:12 am (UTC)Natalya
UML...
Date: 2003-05-28 11:05 am (UTC)