Clint and I had a fabulous time at the OpenLaszlo developer meetup last night. There must have been between 100-150 people in attendance, and we got to see what other folks are doing with the OpenLaszlo platform. Clint chatted with Sarah about contributing some of what we’ve learned about printing back into the OpenLaszlo platform, so hopefully we can make something come of that soon. Some of the other presenters included:

• Tom Conrad showed off the amazing Pandora which allows you to create custom internet radio stations simply by telling the application other artists or songs that you like. If you haven’t seen this yet, definitely check it out.
• Jeff Shood showed us a CRM application built with OpenLaszlo called Homebase.
• Don Hopkins showed his FoxNews parody site SimFaux. Don was very entertaining, and SimFaux was like nothing we’ve ever seen before.
• Nick Bolton and Jens Richnow showed us a preview of their nifty mobile phone application development platform, the Dashwell Project. We really liked the simple UI for creating DB queries that they created.
• Bob Peak from SVCFinancial is building marketing solutions really fast using the OpenLaszlo platform.

Marc Canter asked some of the presenters (including me) why we don’t OpenSource our work. It’s certainly a valid question given that the open sourced, OpenLaszlo platform made Gliffy possible. Giving back to the community is definitely something we would like to do. We’ve talked about our options, but don’t have any solid answers yet…. we gotta make sure we fully understand the ramifications from a business perspective first. We’ll start by working with the Laszlo folks on printing using the Flash APIs, and we’ll see where it goes from there.

Lastly, a huge thanks to all the contributors to the OpenLaszlo platform and the folks that put together this event from Laszlo Systems.

We’ll be presenting Gliffy at the OpenLaszlo developer meetup on March 16th. See you there!

Click here for details

In the last 10 days, we’ve invited nearly 1500 people to try out the beta version of Gliffy. We’ve been getting lots of excellent feedback which will surely help us to dramatically improve the product. THANK YOU BETA USERS! You’re the best!

Several of our beta users have been kind enough to write about us as well. Here are a few we’ve found:

- Michael Sica - “gliffy is pretty impressive.”
- Fred Cavazza (english translation) - translated quote: “…very impressive.”
- t. - “…I found it a useful, intuitive, and visually pleasing tool.”
- A Zulu In Silicon Valley - “This is really cool if you’re looking to share flwocharts, which is currently a huge pain of MS Visio.”
- Ben Atkin - “…I am pretty impressed by the program overall.”
- Billy BLOGirlardo - Making A Diagram In A Jiffy With Gliffy
- Francine Lévesque - “…I find the features are easy to navigate and use”
- Tom Smith’s: theOTHERblog - “I like it.”

Check out Technorati where you can see a whole bunch of blog postings from other folks too. If anyone can translate some of those blogs in Chinese we would love to know what they’re saying…. (The google language tools for Chinese doesn’t quite do it)

We are extremely grateful for all your feedback and support. Thank you!