My interest (after trying lots of different tools, Objecteering, ArgoUML, BoUML) into real UML tools was arised with this one:
UMLet
UMLet allow nice user friendly concept of editing properties of elements direcly as plain text, instead of clumsy dialogs like every other tools what I’d tried so far.
However, appetite grows, and this sounds really interesting:
Plant UML
It’s interesting that UML tools are evolving into such direction that they could be actually used in the proper context (embed them next to actual source code what they are trying to illustrate).
Sure, tools which allow drawing nice diagrams, purely graphically (i.e. everything done via GUI dialogs, etc.) are basically nice, and naive usability expert would think them to be very usable, since they have lots of pretty dialogs. But reality is that these tools are used by software engineers, who are very accustomed in editing program code. For them, dumbing down UI is just very bad idea, and usable UI is actually one which offers flexibility (like, for copying, nothing can really beat copy/paste of text really).
Not even going into fact that after trying gazillion of different UML tools during many years, which store data in their own custom binary format, which becomes completely unreadable when you don’t have the tool. Then you really start appreciate the fact that data is stored in really simple format, which is human readable (yes, XML got ruled out here), which doesn’t use magical internal UUID values and such to identity elements.
References:
List of Unified Modeling Language tools
UML tools (text based)