Few suggestions about user interface

[Edvard Majakari <edvard majakari pampltd com>]

Greetings

First, it's very nice to have Dia. Currently, it is practically the only
alternative for us in creating design diagrams about databases, programs
etc. Thanks for the developers and all who have collaborated.

However, there are few I find a tad annoying. 

Say you create a UML diagram and want to make clear distinction between
some classes. So you decide to make classes A, B and C stand out by using
mauve as background colour and bright red as foreground colour (ugh). You
realise that you have to edit every class separately, because you can't
select all of them and set their colors at once, and you end up with
classes that are only roughly of the same colours. Of course you could
copy one of the objects two times and change all attributes and operations
again, but that'll take time. Annoyed and frustrated you'll learn that
before creating classes you first decide how many of them you need, what
their colours should be, and create an empty class, set the colours and
copy that class n times. 

Then there's another thing related to visibility of an attribute or
operation: now I have to select 'private' for each operation I'm going to
make private. More user-friendly would be if I could first create all
public operations, then select private, and it would default to private
for every operation until I tell otherwise. ie. I think that every
selection should default to last option selected, not the one that is
coded as default in Dia.

Last and probably also least :) it would be nice to have support for some
icons in UML diagrams. Now the 'class scope' is denoted by underscore, and
sometimes I have classes that have only one attribute that is related to
the whole class. In those cases it's quite hard to see that there's an
underscore below the attribute name, but an icon would be more clear
(perhaps the icon would be user-defined?). '#', '+' and '-' are just fine,
though with large UML diagrams containing lots of classes and stuff (say,
over thirty entities in total) it might be better if the distinction was
more apparent, like with icons, or at least the colours of characters '#',
'+' and '-' were different.

I hope I don't ask something that's discussed thoroughly several times :) 

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