Review: Kivio 0.9.1

By: Brian Proffitt
Thursday, November 9, 2000 09:01:26 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/2614/1/

Going With the Flowcharts

If you are out on a first date with someone, it is very unlikely that your prowess with flowcharts is going to come up a dinner topic. If it does, seek help now.

Around the office, making flowcharts a skill that likely won't get you as ostracized. I have a theory about this recent surge of interest in flowcharts. As the new dot.coms sprang into being, the nebulous job titles that appear in these cash-rich havens reflected the creativity that made the business in the first place.

The only problem was, no one knew what the heck a "Chief Idea Manager" was in charge of. Or whom, for that matter. To make matters worse, entitlements and perks such as offices with doors began to vanish.

So, to keep things straight, the organization charts began a-flyin' fast and furious around these new tech firms. Once relegated to the pages of an annual report, suddenly organization charts were a necessity in the dot.com world, if only to find out how far up the food chain your cubicle neighbor was. Handy information to have, particularly to make clear whether the Marilyn Manson coming out of your PC speakers might be offending some lowly flunky--or bothering the company president.

The technical industry also increased the demand for flowcharts in more direct ways. As software development became less of a luxury and more the norm in private industry, programmers got wise to the benefits of creating data and function flowcharts.

In the Windows world, the premier flowcharting software is most certainly Visio. This offering from the Visio Corporation was purchased into the Microsoft sphere of influence (read: assimilated into the Redmond Borg cube) in January 2000, but despite this remains a very comprehensive tool for flowcharting, database mapping, software flow, even office cubicle management. There are only two things wrong with this software for Linux users: it's Microsoft and it's expensive.

But penguin-type flowcharters will soon have a Linux-based alternative to Visio, thanks to the commercial efforts of theKompany.com and its new product Kivio.

Confessions of a Flowchart Junkie

I admit it: I like making flowcharts. Perhaps it's that soothing sense of order I get when the things around me are nicely organized. Perhaps it's that sense of power I get when I change the solid line from a manager to a peon to a dashed line, thus setting the events in motion for my plans for world--er, never mind.

In any case, it was with great anticipation that I downloaded the second beta release of Kivio from theKompany.com's FTP site. Downloads come in the form of a generic source tarball, or packages specifically designed for a number of Linux distributions. In fact, not just any distros, but the latest versions, too. This was a nice touch considering some of these distributions are just days old.

Specifically, the packages were available for Debian (Potato and Woody), Linux-Mandrake (7.2 and Cooker) Red Hat (6.2 and 7.0), Slackware 7.1 (available as a tarball), and SuSE 7.0. Source packages were available for each of these distributions as well, save Slackware.

None of these packages were terribly large, weighing in somewhere around 500 Kb, so download time was not a major factor.

The only significant obstacle to installing this application is the fact it can only be run on KDE2. For non-KDE users, this may be an insurmountable barrier, but if you are in need of a tool with flowcharting and object mapping functions, you might consider temporarily switching over to KDE2 just to use this app.

Installation was done on a SuSE 7.0 machine running KDE2, and worked perfectly. The only hiccup I had was assuming that kivio was the exec name, so I had to flip back to the installation instructions on the Web site to find out what it really was. (It's kiviopart; to save you a step.)

An old veteran of Visio, I was very impressed by the speed in which Kivio came up. Users of Visio know from experience how long it takes for that application to lumber into awareness. Not here. Kivio snapped into place with a full toolbar interface in short order.

When I say full toolbar interface, by the way, I meant it. For some reason, Kivio starts with all eight of its toolbars visible, which takes up quite a bit of screen real estate. Turning off unnecessary toolbars is a simple matter of de-selecting them in the Settings menu, but they always come back when the application is restarted.

The Kivio interface can be a little daunting, given the sheer number of toolbars available. A quick once-over of the Kivio tutorial on theKompany.com's site explains what control does what, so it might be a good idea to keep that handy until you get your bearings.

Kivio works the way other flowcharting applications do, by providing a basic set of shapes (known as stencils in Kivio-speak) which can be dragged-and-dropped onto a canvas and then manipulated with text, color, and size. The default set of 19 stencils is adequate for the simple flowcharting needs, though ideally this default set will expand a bit for the final release.

Connecting stencil shapes is fast and easy. Just select the connector tool then click-and-drag a line from one stencil's anchor shape to another's. Once locked to a stencil, the connectors will bend to any shape or angle to keep those stencils together.

Text editing was a little awkward. To enter text in a stencil, you have to select the stencil, then click on the text editor control to activate the Stencil Text dialog box, where text is entered. It would have been nice to simply double- or center-click a stencil and directly enter text there. It seems that Kivio is halfway there already; as any changes to text attributes (size, typeface, etc.) can be done by simply selecting the stencil and making the changes on the Text toolbar. No Stencil Text box needed at all.

Since screen real estate is such a premium, it was nice to see that Kivio's stencil set is actually a detachable window that can be moved elsewhere on the screen. I also liked the nice disk icon that appeared in Kivio's taskbar control whenever the file I was working on had been modified.

Some functions were not ready for this beta, such as printing, and object property control. Another function I could not test was plugging Python scripts into the Kivio application to add to its core abilities. This plug-in ability will lend a lot of flexibility to Kivio, allowing it to become more than just a flowcharting program. With the right script, for example, Kivio could scan a network and automatically lay out its components as a map. Another added capability could be dynamic scaling of charts.

Kivio, GPL, and Making Money

Kivio is one of a slew of offerings that are about to come out of the theKompany.com, which is described by its president and CEO as "the only commercial company focused on KDE."

That person is Shawn Gordon, whose new company is moving through the KDE community like an expert buyer through a curio shop. Like that curio shopper, Gordon is picking up attractive, perhaps a tad worn-down items, dusting them off and seeing if he can make them work better.

This gentle "are you finished with this?" approach is serving Gordon well so far, having already released PowerPlant, a commercial offering of Linux development tools.

Kivio is the next product to likely ship out theKompany.com's door. Originally called Queesio, this application was the creation of software developer Dave Marotti.

Marotti had begun to put together Queesio as a Linux flowcharting alternative and received some impetus to approach the KOffice development team to see how his application could fit within their framework.

"Prior to Shawn approaching me, I received an email from someone asking if I had ever thought about porting Queesio to KOffice," Marotti related. "I sent an email to the KOffice mailing list and a few of the other KOffice/KDE developers asking if anyone wanted to help port Queesio over to KOffice/KDE. I received no response, so I dropped that idea."

KOffice's loss was theKompany.com's gain, Marotti continued.

"It was actually the same week (or the next, I don't remember) that Shawn approached me and asked if I wanted to get together with theKompany.com to do a KOffice/KDE port. I agreed, and now we are working together to fill a void in the list of Linux applications," Marotti said.

While Gordon fully intends to make money on all of these KDE-related ventures, he does not intend to deprive the Linux community of open source applications. Gordon announced that his company will be releasing Kivio as a GPL product, free of charge.

Customers who acquire Kivio will have the source and the binaries for the basic Kivio product, Gordon explained. The stencils' data, he added, will be copyrighted and sold to customers on an as-needed basis. The basic flowcharting shapes stencil set will be included free with the Kivio release, but the set's source will remain closed.

If additional sets are needed, customers will be able to purchase them for about $5 each and add them to their personal stencil collection.

Gordon also detailed the addition of a stencil builder module to the basic Kivio application, which, when installed, will enable users to create their own stencils in an automated fashion. This stencil builder would not be open sourced, and would sell for around $50.

With this revenue plan in place, Gordon hopes to become a successful commercial presence in the Linux arena.

If Kivio can work out its beta glitches, theKompany.com will have a strong entry into this new market it is creating.