UMLet- an open source UML tool

Some aspects of my day job work are drawing many diagrams. That's part of an architect role to create design documents which need drawings. Sequence and activity diagrams are the most common and used.

I was looking at many tools in the last few years, some are good, some are less. Yet, most of them are very hard to learn, and missing some features that I would like to have. A few make the job well done- but come highly price tag.

What's common with those first class tools, is that if you like to have your diagram a bit off standard, you place yourself into a problem. There's no room for customized diagrams. Sometime, we do need to cut corners and go wild.

While searching, I bumped into UMLet. UMLet is very simple to use, actually, at first glance, it looks too simple. A short intro can be found at their site. Yet it makes the job done. When time passed, I managed to push it to its limits. So it's now my primary working tool.

Yet, I was missing a few basic features like bolding a single word, underlined a word, changing a single line font size. And a few more, that help to get my diagrams to look more professional.

UMLet is offering a powerful tool called a Customized Element, in which you can write in just a few lines of a Java code a new customized element to make it exactly as you like it to be.

So I put sometime and got into this, learned a few tricks, and after a few hours of playing around I can now make my drawings to have a much better L&F, and still keeping the simplicity of using UMLet.

At the moment, my custom palettes include nice versions of Sequence and Activity palettes, prepared and ready to use templates of Arrows, Colors, embedded image and text background styles, and a few versions of rotation of the text, which can be found here: https://github.com/ersh112356/UMLet-palettes

So what I manage to do so far, is drawing professional diagrams that look this:

The templates itself look like this:

Sequence diagram-

Customized activity diagram-

Customized text styles-

Customized colors-

Customized arrows-

Improvements:

• A single word can now be set to Bold,italic, and underlined.
• Background color can now get to be gradient.
• Images can now be embedded into the drawings.
• Text can be written vertically.
• Many predefined templates added to make your life easier.

Limitations:

• valign and halign (which control the alignment of the text) should be disabled and not used anymore.
• RTL (Right to Left) needs a special attention, as words are written at a wrong order. LTR words fine.
• words can't contain '*'; '/'; ; '_' as those are used to bold, italic and underlined words, respectively.

Enjoy...