Grid visibility issues

[Tamás Kiss]

Hi,

I use StarUML mainly for rapid diagram creation, which is useful both for presenting ideas during quick agile development cycles, and for the design documentation of the SW. I must say StarUML yields the best looking diagrams of the tools I've tried so far, and it does not get into my way by popping up all kinds of annoying error message dialogs about semantic mumbo-jumbo I'm not interested in when I'm just sketching ideas. I see a great demand for this kind of functionality, and a great opportunity for StarUML in the market. The reason is that honestly in most companies UML is a presentation and documentation tool instead of a semantic modeller, but currently there is no product that fits this need: full-fledged UML modellers are very complicated, strict, and produce crappy diagrams (they focus on the model correctness instead), and the general diagram drawing programs have only very limited UML drawing capabilities, e.g. you usually create the "UML" elements yourself and drag them to the right location with hard manual work, because the drawing tool has no idea what it is and where it belongs, and how the whole thing fits together.

This usage method of StarUML means I use the grid extensively to align and resize the diagram elements, in order to get a neat looking diagram. I have two grid usability problems I'd like to share with you:

(1) The grid colour cannot be adjusted. This is usually not a problem, but on certain older monitors which have lower contrast and brightness capabilities, the grid disappears completely. When I first noticed it I thought that was a program fault and I was about to report it, but then I dragged the StarUML window from my old external monitor to the laptop display, and saw that the grid was actually there.

(2) There is no way to make the diagram elements opaque, so If I want to align e.g. a class inside a package, the package's white background hides the grid, so I can't see if I managed to snap the class boundaries to the grid lines, or to halfway between two grid lines. I also cannot see the exact width and height of the class. It is important because if I connect e.g. two classes with a supposedly horizontal line, the line will not really be horizontal unless the relative sizes and positions of the two classes are correct. A small mistake is hard to see (or even invisible) during diagram drawing, but when I export the diagram and put it to a document, then those little misalignments cause the lines to have big ugly "breaks", because the lines are rasterized and not perfectly horizontal. For quick sketches it's not a problem, but in public documentation it looks very unprofessional.

So, for (1) I'd like to ask if it were possible to adjust the grid colour (not necessarily in the GUI, it's OK for me to edit a config file, or whatever).

For (2), I can imagine three possible solutions:
(a) introduce the opaque "fill colour" feature, which could be used to temporarily make the containers opaque thus making the grid behind them visible;
(b) I saw in other diagramming tools a solution to show rubber lines (a.k.a "cross hair") following the mouse cursor while an element is being positioned or resized, this way the current mouse location can be referred to the grid lines;
(c) introduce an option (and preferably a switch button or keyboard shortcut) to put the grid in front of all the diagram elements instead of behind them.

Thanks,
Tamas

[StarUML]

Hi Tamas,

Thank you for your ideas. It would be great if you can post yourself to our UserVoice (https://staruml.uservoice.com/forums/245359-feature-request) so as to collect votes from many other users.

Thanks,

StarUML Team

2016년 5월 8일 일요일 오후 10시 45분 52초 UTC+9, Tamás Kiss 님의 말:

[Tamás Kiss]

Hi,

Thanks, I've posted the item which I considered to be the most important one.