John Goldsmith's visLog

Touch gestures construction – Constraining angles

In this second post on the Touch Gesture shapes construction I thought I’d look at a method for constraining the angle of a shape…

Touch gestures construction – zOrder in groups

In the next few posts I thought I’d take a look at some interesting aspects of the Touch Gesture shapes from a Visio shape development perspective.

To kick things off, this post will look at one way to achieve blending circles, without any [apparent] overlap…

Touch Gestures with Visio

A little while ago I spotted a post by Luke Wroblewski in which he has produced a Touch Gesture reference guide.  The guide identifies ‘core gestures’ across the following platforms:

• iPhone
• Windows Phone 7
• Palm webOS
• Android
• OSX (trackpad and Magic Mouse)
• Windows 7
• Wacom Bamboo
• GestureWorks (Flash)
• Microsoft Surface

Being a multitouch fan (the Dell Studio 17 is a great machine) I contacted Luke and developed three Visio touch gesture shapes – Hand, TouchPoints and Arrow.  You can now download the zipped Visio stencil and template set over at Luke’s reference guide post.  The stencil and template work on Visio 2003, 2007 and 2010, and there’s a ReadMe text file that describes how to install the files correctly.

For this post I thought I’d write a quick review of how these shapes work…

Using sketchy fonts in Visio

Some time ago I looked at how to create random custom line patterns in Visio.  Today I spotted an interesting free sketchy feel font called ‘Sketchetik Light’, via Smashing Magazine, and thought it would be useful for the Visio wireframers out there…

Automating Visio’s Save As Web output

A newsgroup question came up a little while ago about how to automate Visio’s Save As Web function and as this is an area that I’m quite keen on, I thought I’d write a quick post about it.  I’m really just going to cover what’s available in the help files but hopefully it will prove useful just reading from a different perspective.

As I mentioned, all of the documentation is available from the MSDN library, with the additional code samples found in the downloadable Visio 2007 SDK (a 2010 SDK will be available as the Visio gets its official launch in May)…

Social media icons for Visio

I just spotted a post over at Snap 2 Objects.com and thought I’d highlight it here.  This site is a great resource for both icons and other graphics and is particularly interesting for Visio users as they frequently produce both vector  and raster formats.

The latest post, “Social Media Icons Mega Pack”, has a zip download from Carlos Carvajalino containing svg, ai and eps file formats, for the vector crowd, and also the same range in png format.

Visio can import svg files (File / Open and then set the file type to svg), but on this occasion I found that it had a few issues with managing some of the layers.  For example, on the apple shape above, the logo shapes didn’t make it through.  My guess is that if you open either the eps or ai files in Illustrator then you’ll be able to copy and paste over the shapes of interest.

If you do elect to use the vector shapes, which would be the ideal option, you will probably want to modify shape as svg makes for a pretty heavy shape.  For example, I pasted one of the apple shapes across to a new page and then had a peep at the Drawing Explorer and discovered that its made up of about 160 individual shapes, some of which are grouped groups – not good.

I should point out that this isn’t the fault of the designer, it’s just that the conversion process from svg to Visio produces a fairly heavy shape that need to be optimized if you going to use many instances in your diagram.

If you want to avoid the work then I would probably go for the png versions as they come in 32, 64 and 128 pixel versions.

Anyway, it’s a great set of icons and I can see it having a home in various Visio network and site maps.

Drawing RSS icons in Visio – Part 2

In Part 1 of this post I looked at how to draw a 2D RSS icon shape for Visio using it as an example of how to use operations that manipulate a shape’s underlying geometry.  In this post I’m going to move on to a 3D version and whilst I’m going to use some similar techniques the focus, this time, is going to be on breaking down a complex shape based on colour…

Drawing RSS icons in Visio – Part 1

I was looking at an RSS icon the other day and thought it would make a good example of how to draw custom shapes in Visio.  You can, of course, use bitmap based images and save yourself all of the drawing, but if you want to include any interaction within the shape and if you want it to scale without degrading then the vector route is the one to choose. 

I’ll split this into two posts:- in the first I’ll look at a 2D icon and use the shape operations functionality and in the second, I look at a 3D icon and try and break down the shape in terms of its colours…

Embedding PDF and XPS files in Visio Save As Web output

There was a recent question in the newsgroups asking how you could print the correct drawing frame in Visio’s Save As Web output.  David Parker suggested including a PDF file in the process and creating a link to it, so I thought I’d look at one way of achieving this.

Building dynamic hyperlinks

Moving on from the previous post, where I looked at the basics of hyperlinks in Visio, today I’m going to consider how to build dynamic hyperlinks using the ShapeSheet.

I’ve thought up a couple of slightly contrived examples to demonstrate how this functionality might be applied but there are no doubt many other applications out there and I’d love to hear if you have other examples...