Here at Docfacto, we’re constantly scribbling down design ideas to share with each other, either on the whiteboard or on plain paper. Sometimes they’ll be needed for future use, for user/clients, or to better explain code; in such cases we’ll usually take a picture and upload this. There are several problems with this approach though, sometimes these ideas get lost, or the designs change but aren’t recorded.
Or maybe a German client wishes to see designs of the system but with German text, in such a case we’d have to re-create all the images from scratch with the translated text.
We wanted a way to prevent all this extra work, we wanted to make it easy, we wanted a way for developers to quickly draw out ideas, in an environment that they’re used to, without having to learn any new fancy graphical editing program; and thus, beermat was born.
Beermat solves a number of the problems mentioned previously. Beermat is a tool which will allow developers to quickly jot down new ideas, or edit previous design ideas, completely inside the most widely used development environment, Eclipse. Making things a lot quicker and a lot easier for a developer, if an idea comes to mind, simply open beermat, draw it out, press save, and if needed it’s location can be linked to selected code.
But Beermat isn’t your average graphical editing tool embedded in Eclipse, Beermat creates and edits in SVG. If you haven’t already started using SVG for design/documentation diagrams, you should definitely give it a try. SVG provides the infinite scalability without loss of quality that raster graphics cannot (JPEG, PNG)
SVG is XML based, meaning the vector graphics are represented by text elements. Any element can easily be changed, without having to erase and re-draw sections, as you would with vector. This also solves the problem with our German clients, text in SVG’s are actual text, and any English text can simply be swapped out with the translated text without disturbing the image.
Beermat brings developers the ease of use and speed of simple graphical editor, but with the smarts and structure brought on by SVG, and all within developers favorite IDE.
Beermat is available now, more product information can be found here.
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