I use visio at work also. Good Idea to draw patches like that. Maybe we
could figure out how to convert them to other formats for others.
>From: "Tkacs, Ken" <ken.tkacs@...>
>Reply-To: motm@onelist.com
>To: "'motm@onelist.com'" <motm@onelist.com>
>Subject: [motm] Patch Diagramming
>Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2000 15:04:01 -0500
>
>
>Are any of you familiar with an iconic drawing program called "Visio"? It's
>a great way of quickly dragging/dropping pre-defined shapes onto a vector
>drawing field and dynamically connecting the shapes. It gives you a lot of
>flexible options for designing your own shapes with "magic" properties,
>connectors that follow shapes around as you move them, etc.
>
>I use it at work to maintain drawings of our massive & constantly changing
>server room racks, showing connections, etc. I can even assign URLs to the
>elements, in this case the IP addresses of the manageable switches, &c., so
>just double-clicking on a drawing of a switch brings up an HTML management
>console. It's very fast, very cool.
>
>Rumor is Microsoft just bought them. Their products have always dovetailed
>very smoothly with MS Office.
>
>Anyway, I mention it because, while this program is fantastic for org
>charts, network diagrams, etc., I've recently been thinking that it would
>be
>worth making a stencil bar of MOTM modules. then for patch sheets, all I
>need do is drag the modules I'm using off the palette ("Stencil") bar, drag
>colored connecting lines that will dynamically change as I shuffle the
>modules around on the 'page,' and viola! Completely consistent,
>professional, yet customized patch diagrams.
>
>I haven't had a chance to do this yet, but I plan to. I wouldn't mind
>giving
>out the stencil that I create; maybe Paul would even put it on his site as
>a
>freebie for MOTM users.
>
>I was actually thinking of three stencils: one with 'realistic' drawings of
>the modules for designing systems, one with more 'stylized' versions for
>recording settings, etc., and one using the classic symbolic patch system
>developed in the Seventies (circles for sources, triangles for modifiers,
>rectangles for controllers, etc.).
>
>On the other hand, if no one else has Visio, this doesn't help you much.
>Dell used to give away a free "Lite" copy on their PCs for a while, but
>they
>stopped doing this.
>
>
>
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