My favorite has always been Vizio from M$.  http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/visio/

I had to use Visio for a basic programming logic class I had started this January -- it seems like a great program. Not sure where the year went, but I had to leave school before finishing the class because of finances and an ill family member who needed around the clock care. It was great to revisit the flow chart/pseudocode stuff I had started learning earlier this year in the WiBit course!

However, I'm still freaked out by the number of symbols and the idea that it's not a standardized practice -- I ended up making printouts of that section's PDF and putting them on my bulletin board! Everything else has been assimilated into my now massive Evernote notebook for Wibit stuff.....

Looking forward to starting the next course! :)

I always use Inkscape as a free alternative and actually prefer it over Visio. But it might not do some model export stuff that Visio can.

Pretty good for flow charts though. And you can find free symbols packs online as well.

Here's a basic flow chart icon pack from the open clip art site:

http://www.openclipart.org/detail/152881/flow-chart--by-techwriter

You can use these in Inkspace. Also, use the Connector Tool to draw the links between each object. Let me know if you have any questions.. and if you make an awesome flow chart, post it here and show us how it turned out!

Bryan

Dia is nice, I used to use it for my telco diagrams. It's nice and free alternative to other commercial products available on the market. Of course it lacks functionality in certain points, final results are not that "fancy" and good looking like for instance outputs from Visio. It's nice useful and free tool which will do its job if necessary. As far as I know Dia is not being actively developed anymore so in case you're expecting frequent updates or new features then this is not something you'd like to have on your computer. I might be wrong though on the topic with releases ...