FlowLine - a business process modelling tool married with an outliner

Posted by Slartibartfarst
Nov 12, 2018 at 04:55 AM

Slartibartfarst reply to @Rochus: 2018-11-12 1515hrs
Many thanks for the opportunity to review FL2 (FlowLine2).
I haven’t had time to give the thing a thorough going-over, but here’s my initial response: Absolutely blown away by it.
I haven’t been so pleasantly surprised by a piece of process modelling software since I first met Platinum Software’s BPWin (IDEF0/3 and ABC modelling).
FL2 seems to be very stable - I can usually “break” a piece of Beta software, so I’d guess this version had been well-tested in the field.
FL2 seems to be a really rather beautiful piece of programming, pulled together by intelligent design using consolidation/integration of different components/modules in the public domain (why reinvent a mousetrap?). Sure, it seems to have some idiosyncrasies, but when I explored them, they seemed to be elegant approaches to the real-world problem of ensuring that the UI was ergonomically as intuitive and simple to use as possible - e.g., for someone who was working on building AND documenting a process model. Nice and easy combination of the two - model building AND process documenting.

I haven’t used BPM notation in many years (having preferred to stay with IDEF0 etc., because of the latter’s elegant simplicity and the ability to logically prove the models). However, if one were to use BPMN then one would arguably be bonkers not to try FL2 out - and it has the very useful outlining tool built-in.
Not sure whether there is a BPMN FIPS or whether FL2 is aligned with such a FIPS.

Examples of really useful ergonomics in the UI:
- Scrolling up/down/sideways in the model, using the main diagram page OR the little Overview pane.
- Direct entry of text into the model symbols (shapes).
- Copy/paste of document sections creates a wiki-link to a section.

Examples of missing/room for improvement (or of my lack of understanding after a cursory examination):
- Chiral scrolling works for up/down navigation in the diagram, but not for sideways navigation (might be a problem with my TouchPad software?).
- Undo/Redo functionality works in text edit mode, but not apparent otherwise(?); could be a timesaver, if added.
- DELETE key doesn’t seem to do what it might intuitively be expected to do in some circumstances.
- INSERT key functionality?

Would like to explore about viewing/printing on A4 or A3 layouts, with off-page linkages correctly tagged, horizontal swim-lane representations, etc.

Summary: Really rather good - from this cursory look-see. Potentially VERY useful.

Thanks again.
S.
_______________________________
Rochus wrote:
Me again: I open-sourced yet another of my tools which I developed
>during the last ten years as a byproduct of my consulting work. It is a
>modelling tool supporting Functional Analysis and Business Process
>Modelling using Event-driven process chain (EPC) syntax with BPMN
>extensions (instead of Functional Flow Block Diagrams). Besides that it
>shares most features with my CrossLine outliner. In case you are
>interested, here is the project site:
>https://github.com/rochus-keller/FlowLine2 . Again there are
>pre-compiled binaries for Windows and Linux as well as a demo repository
>containing some (work in progress) documentation.