I’ve been a big fan Adobe’s graphics applications for the past 10 years and it was always boggled my mind why Adobe has never produced a diagramming tool like Visio or Omni Graffle. Back in the days when I worked solely on web sites, site maps and abstract page layouts were generally created using tools like Illustrator, FreeHand, Quark, or InDesign. Keep in mind too that the creative folks were generally Mac users, a platform that Microsoft ditched when Visio was acquired back in 2000. At that point, ConceptDraw was the only tool that came close to Visio. Unfortunately, it didn’t have all the “make it pretty” features that tools like Illustrator or Quark have so it didn’t get much attention.

My wife does Information Architecture for several interactive agencies, and to this day, they’re all still using the same tools. What is more interesting is how many places are using Adobe InDesign as an IA tool! It is slightly ironic a tool designed for print is being used for web application content planning. But I guess what is more interesting is that Adobe hasn’t spotted this trend and created an application to fill this void. But then again, marketing wisdom might say: why create a product that will kill sales of your big-ticket item?

But it’s not just web folks that could be interested in a product like this; prior to the Adobe acquisition, Macromedia had gained a steady following of Java & Flash developers. Flash has become must more powerful in recent years and Flash applications have grown fairly complex. So much so, that I have seen Flash developers use UML tools such a MagicDraw or Omni Graffle to plan a Flash application. Not to mention that web applications such as gModeler could indicate that there is some interest among the Flash community in a decent diagramming tool.

Imagine how nice an Adobe Diagramming tool would be with that familiar Macrodobe UI along with integration into other Adobe applications? The only question now is: Is Adobe listening?