I still reckon Visio is more suited to most uses at work. The big thing Visio has that iDraw hasn't is the concept of connections. Visio is all about shapes (boxes, circles etc.) and the connections between them. Move a box, and the linked connecting lines intelligently reposition themselves to preserve the links. Great for org. charts, mind maps, and technical diagrams.
iDraw doesn't do that. Everything is a "path" which you can edit but which remains separate from other objects on the page. Having said that, I'm finding iDraw far more powerful in respects that make it way more suited to my purposes at home.
iDraw makes it incredibly easy to draw irregular shapes using the line and pen tools, and to tinker with shapes you've already drawn. Visio is fairly limited here. A rectangle, for example, can be squeezed and stretched and rotated but remains stubbornly rectangular. Many times I've had to cobble together an overlapping collage of boxes in Visio to achieve an effect, but with iDraw, you can create highly complex shapes with ease. Many of the other tools, such as line and fill, also offer huge degrees of control and flexibility.
As well as being easier in many ways, there are things I can do in iDraw that I could never hope to achieve at all in Visio. More on that another time, maybe...
I've now got a few very different drawing projects on the go, including a star chart, architectural drawings, and mock-ups for a book cover. To give it a fair comparative road test, though, I tackled a project similar to something I'd already done successfully in Visio. Over Christmas, I drew a ship plan using Visio. This time I used iDraw to produce plans for another ship that will feature in the sequel to Ghosts of Innocence.
(Click on image to zoom in)
Conclusions: Because this type of drawing is mostly collections of simple lines, both tools are easy to use in broad terms. However, iDraw makes it easier to add curved elements, and I found it handy to separate parts of the drawing into layers for easier editing. I know I can achieve good results in both tools, but my preference now is firmly for iDraw.
Case closed. Happy camper.
How's your Easter weekend going? We are having a fabulous time. Warm sun, and the deck is now cleaned and the furniture brought up from winter storage.
Posts
