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It's been some time since we have seen a new version of AllClear, the text-based flowcharting program. The primary reason is that Clear Software, creator of AllClear, was purchased by SPSS Inc., Chicago, and the program has undergone a significant overhaul in the past year. The recently released version 4.0 is the result and AllClear has clearly benefited from the influence of its new owners.
AllClear retains the one aspect that makes it unique in the flowcharting market-the ability to convert a text outline into a flowchart and to modify that chart to reflect any changes made to the outline.
Whether you like to create flowcharts by creating a text outline or by dragging and dropping shapes onto a grid is a matter of personal preference. I prefer the drag-and-drop method but have talked to more than one person who is a big fan of the text-outline approach.
In general, the text-input aspect of the program seems to better execute what I want, though I can't point to specific reasons why. Maybe I'm just getting better at text-entry flowchart creation. Two notable improvements in the text-entry system are a spell checker and an outline tool-tree structure that allows...