Dia is for drawing Diagrams
It is a bad sign if you ever feel the need to read the user manual of a program but I decided I really should take a look at it and try to bring it more up to date. When I noticed the incorrectly spelled pnumatic (sic) I decided it had to be done and I got stuck in, making the changes I that had been at the back of my mind for a long time. During the last fortnight I put several sessions of a few hours work each time into reading and rereading the documentation and went about gradually rephrasing, refining and adding to various sections. As I went along it became increasing apparent to me that there was potentailly a massive amount of room for improvement but suprisingly this didn't bother me and I was very satisfied by the improvements I was able to make the problems I was able to fix.
Writing documentation helped me see more things in Dia that need improving. It forced me to learn how to use functionality I had never properly looked into and it helped me discover new functionality I never even realised existed. Having used Dia for more than a few years, I was surprised how much functionality was buried in the context menu of the Diagram Tree, there are all sorts of functions for sorting the object list and hiding (and showing) objects of specific types. I will have to give more thought as to how Dia can be improved and how more of this functionality can be brought forward and made more easily discoverable.
Here's hoping I can get Dia to build and learn more about GTK so I can start making some of the changes I really want, there are so many ideas that it should be relatively easy to borrow from applictions like the Gimp and Inkscape, and more than a few long standing bug reports that could do with some attention.
The important point is the sense of satisfaction I got from working on Dia that I have not felt in a long time.
Dia Hompage at Gnome.org
Advogato Project Page for Dia