Patch Diagramming
2000-03-01 by Tkacs, Ken
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.