Flying Logic Pro helps your visually organize your line of thoughts. It becomes an ideal tool for multiple professional activities that require deep thinking, such as writing, coaching, project management, process improvement and public speaking. Likewise, it may come in handy for students trying to make sense of their reading, for instance.
The interface is rather complex with the toolbar, menus and tabs. In this regard, the toolbar contains buttons for common tasks, like undoing, redoing, cutting, copying, pasting, deleting, adding an entity and many more. There are also document tabs, which let you work on various projects simultaneously. The sidebar on the left, in turn, contains eight collapsible inspectors: Document, Domain, Navigation, Layout, Operators, Element, Text and Attributes.
Although you can start from scratch, it is a better idea to first take a look at one of the examples provided and manipulate it a little. Luckily, you can get as much support as you want as there is a very detailed user guide and at least two forums supported by its community.
As said, you can create a new diagram from nothing. Luckily, there are domains, which have been conveniently arranged into categories like General, Effects-based Planning, Conflict Resolution, Pre-requisite Tree and Evidence-based Analysis. In fact, it is possible to create new domains if you need to. In order to draw a diagram, there are different types of elements, but basically, they are shapes representing actions or steps and connectors that link them. In addition, you can add detailed descriptions and use custom colors to make the diagram more easily understandable.
The developers claim there is a solid theoretical base upon which they have created their tool. In this respect, it is recommendable to gain at least basic insight into the Theory of Constraints, which would allow you to exploit the application’s features at full.
The tool allows generating new diagrams by importing charts from CSV files and scripts. Likewise, it uses its own file format (XLOGIC) to store your work. Once you have finished your work, the diagrams can be shared using such popular formats as PDF, JPEG, PNG and XML.
In general, Flying Logic Pro is highly recommended if you need to analyze complex problems by breaking them down into related parts. The product is cross-platform but, in this case, it also means it is Java-based, which would explain why it takes so long to load. It is good to know that the Pro version can be tried for free and there is another version, called Reader, available for free.
v2.0 [Oct 16, 2011]
- There are additional Windows menu navigation keyboard shortcuts. Bugs Fixed
- On Mac, hidden modal dialogs no longer block the Preferences and About menu items from functioning.
- Fixed an exception in entity class drag-and-drop.
- When a group is hoisted, dragging an element out of a nested group into the canvas background now properly puts the element in the hoisted group.
- The cursor is placed at the end of a newly added hyperlink with the cursor's formatting set to no hyperlink.
- Milestones (entities with an effort of 0 days) now have visible completion spinners.
- Completion is now properly exported to MS Project XML files.
- Example domains can now be either imported into the current document or opened as a new document
- The default English (en) version of a resource is now being properly used in non-English locales when no localized version exists. Feature Removed
- Export to MS Project MPX files has been removed. Such files were not compatible with later versions of MS Project.
