Dia Portable 0.97 Released by PortableApps.com

Submitted by Bart.S on August 19, 2009 - 12:51pm

logoPortableApps.com is proud to announce the release of Dia Portable 0.97. Dia is a diagramming program roughly inspired by the commercial Windows program Visio, though more geared towards informal diagrams for casual use. It can be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams and has special objects to help draw entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and many other diagrams. It's packaged as a portable app, so you can do your technical drawing wherever you are. It's packaged in PortableApps.com Format so it can easily integrate with the PortableApps.com Suite. And it's open source and completely free.

Read on for more details...

Features

dia_portable_small.pngDia is a full-featured diagramming program. It can be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams and has special objects to help draw entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and many other diagrams. It is also possible to add support for new shapes by writing simple XML files, using a subset of SVG to draw the shape.

Dia can load and save diagrams to a custom XML format, can export diagrams to a number of formats including EPS, SVG, XFIG, WMF and PNG, and can print diagrams (including ones that span multiple pages).

Learn more about Dia...

PortableApps.com Installer / PortableApps.com Format

Dia Portable is packaged in a PortableApps.com Installer so it will automatically detect an existing PortableApps.com installation when your drive is plugged in. It supports upgrades by installing right over an existing copy, preserving all settings. And it's in PortableApps.com Format, so it automatically works with the PortableApps.com Suite including the Menu and Backup Utility.

Download

Dia Portable is available for immediate download from the Dia Portable homepage. Get it today!

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Comments

John T. Haller's picture

Thanks for your work on this, Bart.S

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

I've been hoping for a PortableApps release of Dia. Well done, and thanks!!!

Cheers!
---Fox

Congrats Bart!

Too many lonely hearts in the real world
Too many bridges you can burn
Too many tables you can't turn
Don't wanna live my life in the real world

Thank you for this. I have been using my own dia via portable apps for a while now. Now I can use the decent portable version!

...I was looking for some program like this, now I have a chance to check it out portably Smile .... THANK YOU ... and BIG UPs ... Wink

Thanks to OliverK, your "guerilla" took me to the dev side of life.
Thanks to Patrick Patience for giving my apps a home on his server. The first is grown up and leaving home now.
Thanks to John T. Haller for all his work here.
Thanks to all fellow devs and testers.
Oh, and thanks to all original Dia devs and contributors for making such a wonderful program.

Happy portable diagramming 8)

When I start Dia its window appears in the top left corner of my screen, the top and menu bars are off-screen, so I cannot access them to drag the window onto the screen. The only thing I can do is use Alt-F4 to close it. Not very useful...
How do I get around this?

Rien.

The window properties are stored at "DiaPortable\Data\settings\.dia\persistence". You could edit that file with Notepad++ Portable. The size and position of the main window are stored between line 37 and 53.

<dia:window role="dia-main-window">
    <dia:attribute name="xpos">
      <dia:int val="-161"/>
    </dia:attribute>
    <dia:attribute name="ypos">
      <dia:int val="226"/>
    </dia:attribute>

You could edit the values of the "xpos" and "ypos", they shouldn't be negative. The above example has the "xpos" value set to -161, so it's off-screen. The position "xpos" = 0, "ypos" = 0 is the upper left corner of your screen.
Hope that helps. If you have further questions, please create a new topic in the support forums and don't post here (it's a news story).

Chris Morgan's picture

As a temporary solution to move or resize a window, Alt+Space will get you to the main window menu from which you can resize or move the window with the arrow keys.

But if you do continue having issues, post a thread in the support forum about it.

I am a Christian and a developer and moderator here.

“A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” – Proverbs 15:1

I looked at the xpos and ypos parameter and they were both set to '0'. Still the window was partly off the top of the screen, the left was at the left of the screen.
I user the 'alt-space' trick to move the window to the top left corner of the screen; after I exited Dia the ypos was set to 358...

I would guess this has something to do with the fact that I have a second screen active. Even though the window is created on the primary screen (1440*900), it appears to use the size of the secondary screen (1680*1050) to position itself.

After positioning the windows once it comes up normally the next time. Completely removing and re-installing Dia causes it to start off-screen again; the behaviour is reproducible.

John T. Haller's picture

I'd report that to the Dia team as it looks like a they're using the wrong screen measurements, at least on Windows.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

sdteffen's picture

Thanks for reporting this problema and thanks for the follow-up!

Does this problem also exist with the "non-portable" version of Dia?
It's available from

http://dia-installer.de

From the description, you've given so far, I assume that this is not a duplicate of
Dia bug #354266, but I would like to confirm this:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=354266

Could you switch primary and secondary screen? Is there a specific reason why you don't use the larger screen as the primary screen?

The non-portable version also exhibits this problem.

The problem shows up immediately after installation, without any screen changes as in bug #354266.

How do I switch primary/secondary screens? The controls to do that are greyed out.
I use the smaller screen as the primary because it's attached to my keyboard (=notebook :-))

sdteffen's picture

I tried to reproduce your problem, but failed so far.
Which operating system do you use exactly?
Is your Windows Deskop extended to the secondary monitor?

Just a thought, have you tried different set-ups?

  • primary screen on the left-hand side, secondary screen on the right-hand side
  • secondary screen on the left-hand side, primary screen on the right-hand side

Welcome here at PortableApps.com Smile

* primary screen on the left-hand side, secondary screen on the right-hand side

This shows the error

* secondary screen on the left-hand side, primary screen on the right-hand side

The window comes up at the top left corner of secondary screen, visible.
When I move the secondary screen back to the right, the Dia window remains in the same position on the secondary screen.
The secondary is to the left and slighty up from the primary (the top of the primary is about halfway up the secondary); when I move the secondary downwards to to the right and completely below the primary, Dia starts up in the upper left corner of the primary...

Darkbee's picture

I use this at work from time to time, but I don't like to install software on my work computer if I can avoid it (or my home computer for that matter). Now I have one less app to install. Yay! Great work!

have you tried 'Edit -> Copy Diagram'?.

You'll get better and faster answers if you ask such questions on the Dia mailing list. See here.

Hope that helps. Smile