I’m curious what tools people have found useful for building flowcharts. Obviously MS Visio and OmniGraffle come to mind but they both feel so bloated and also tend to emphasize the document formatting/printing side and less on helping to organize the actual logic. Is there anything else out there that fellow developers would recommend?
I’m hoping to find something fairly simple that would let me throw together flowcharts on the fly when I’m working through complex logic. I don’t care about formatting or fonts or the like, just something that would help me keep my logic organized as I work through it. Even something that would arrange the chart itself and simply allow me to specify where to branch and what to check, etc.
Any OS would be fine, though I personally lean towards OS X apps as this has recently been my primary work environment.
Though you list it as bloated I nonetheless use OmniGraffle.
For quick flowcharting a series of boxes with lines to magnets in the boxes is sufficient, but the rest of the formatting options are good to have later. I find that any flowchart I take the time to draw generally ends up in a document somewhere. Even when I’m just trying to understand some difficult code, I end up with a one page document which attempts to explain that code for the next poor schmuck who has to dig in.