Old Floorplan Shapes	New Floorplan shapes

One of the big themes this summer has been to improve the overall quality of Gliffy. One of the first steps we’ve taken in this direction is to improve the way our product looks. Today we are proud to announce what we think is a huge step in this direction: New super awesome floorplan shapes

Notice that the new floorplan shapes are much more detailed than before and have been rendered by a professional artist. These changes are guaranteed to improve the quality of your Floorplan diagrams. Also notice that you may set the color of the floorplan shapes to match the color of your actual furniture. More importantly, the infrastructure we’ve built to make these new floorplan shapes is going to enable us to produce additional shape libraries at a faster pace. Are you missing a particular shape library? Let us know, and we’ll see what we can do about getting it into the product.

In addition to the new floorplan shapes, here are some bugs we’ve fixed as well:

• Issue when opening a diagram and immediately printing only printed a small corner of the diagram
• Fit to Screen for default 5000 x 5000 will now fit actual diagram in view pane, and not whole page.
• Fix for NaN showing up for Yahoo Image search image size
• Issue where zooming out on very wide or very tall diagram and then zooming back in caused page to be lost
• For SVG shapes, when deleting and undo, any line connections were not being remembered

Atlassian has posted video from the June Atlassian User Group Meeting in Palo Alto.

Jon Silvers noted that our presentation was “one of the most provocative presentations of the day”. Thanks Jon!

If you missed it, here is your chance to check it out!

I came across these over the last few weeks, thought you might enjoy them:

“Choosy Teachers Choose Gliffy” (can’t get much better than being compared to peanut butter)

"How do you like My First Gliffy?” (we have achieved noun status)

A poem:

Here’s a blog, there’s a blog, a wiki-wiki, mindmap. 

Gliffy- moodle, tapped in, google scholar rap. 

If you want to make sense and save yourself a dime 

better get a second life or you won’t have the time.

Let us know what has caught your attention! ~Debi K

We’ve released a minor bugfix update of the Gliffy Plugin for Confluence. Any customer who exports PDF’s of wiki pages from Confluence or has Anonymous users editing diagrams will want to upgrade to this release. You can download this updated plugin via the repository client, or on our download page. The updates in this release include:

• Fixed issue which caused diagrams saved by anonymous users to throw errors when they were edited.
• Fixed issue where diagrams in PDF exports of wiki pages containing diagrams with i18n names didn’t render correctly

Restart Confluence after installing any update to the Gliffy Plugin for Confluence to ensure you get back up and running quickly.

Just who is this Debi team member at Gliffy? Alas, it was not you, but us that overlooked introducing myself to all of you Gliffy drawing fanatics. Joining Gliffy in May, I jumped right into a variety of support and invoice related activities. I’m currently providing backup to Mike and Chris so they can get out more! I bring another timezone (CDT) to our team and some more X chromosomes. Looking forward to hearing from you and seeing what you draw!

Debik at Gliffy dot Com

With this release we’ve added some new features that should make working with Gliffy a lot easier.

New Document Manager

The first new feature you’ll notice is an enhanced document manager. Since our service has been out for over a year now, users have had a chance to create many Gliffy diagrams like flow charts and network diagrams. Our most active users have literally hundreds of diagrams and the new document manager will make sorting through large numbers of documents much easier.

• The document manager now takes up more of the screen which enables us to provide more information to you than ever
• Diagrams can now be tagged to enable large numbers of documents to be managed and organized easier. Create a tag by entering a tag name under ‘Create new tag’, and then drag documents onto a tag to apply it. A document may have multiple tags applied to it.
• We now have a preview feature which will make finding that favorite diagram of yours faster without having to actually open up the document. When a diagram is clicked once in the diagram list, a preview of that diagram is shown making it easier to see what the document is before you open it.

Larger default diagram size by default

Previously, the default document size was meant to imitate a standard sized piece of paper. In reality, we’re not tied to paper as much in the wonderful internet enabled world. As a result, we’ve decided to break with tradition an enable a much larger drawing area by default (5000 X 5000 pixels)

We think this should make creating new drawings a lot more user friendly since you wont be constrained by a single page. You’ll also find that when you ‘publish’ or export a document, the resulting document is automatically sized to match the contents of the drawing. Slick, eh?

Other minor improvements

• Grid size changes when zooming
• Default Text Format. When making text style changes, they get remembered for faster diagram editing.
• Zooming using drop down should keep page positioned to center of view on page to make diagram navigation easier.
• Uploaded Animated GIFs should not break export/publish
• Performance using hand tool and scrollbars with large diagrams with the grid on is greatly improved.
• Various other minor bugs fixed for your drawing pleasure

Next time you have an idea, try drawing it out using Gliffy instead of writing it out. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words!

http://www.gliffy.com

In this issue

• Gliffy In The News - Great Computer World article with a quote from one of our favorite users
• Poll - We are interested in your feedback.
• Clint’s Drawing Tip of the Month - More drawing control with Lock Shape
• Friends of Gliffy - Freshbooks - We highly recommend our invoicing solution
• Gliffy Online Update
• Gliffy Plugin for Confluence Update - Version 1.3.3 released
• Gliffy User Of The Month - We could not ask for a better video
• Gliffy In Action - Diagrams

Gliffy In The News

• Goodbye ‘bloatware,’ hello Web apps -

InfoWorld, CA - Jun 29, 2007 - Gliffy is a flow chart and diagram application that works exactly like Microsoft Visio. To create a flow chart, you just drag icons onto the document area. …

• Draw And Share Diagrams On The Web With Gliffy -

19 Jun 2007 by Raj - Gliffy is an online tool for creating flowcharts, org charts, database schemas, diagrams, site layouts, etc. Gliffy comes very close to providing Microsoft Visio capabilities on the web. Gliffy runs in your web browser, there is no need … Tech News, Software Reviews, Blog Tips…

• Google + Gliffy -

28 Jun 2007 by Willi - That changed sometime in May when I was making some changes to my basement remodel diagram on Gliffy, and noticed that they added the ability to collaborate. Fast forward to today - at one point half the ScribeStorm employees were … Living in Small Sizes -

POLL - We are interested in your feedback

Tell us how we can improve and what is important to you!

Clint’s Drawing Tip of the Month - More Drawing Control with Lock Shape

So you got that cool background image in your Gliffy diagram you want to start decorating with shapes and text. But, as you start dropping things onto the image and moving them around, you accidentally move the background image around too. Now you have to re-position it again. This can be painful and annoying and may cause swelling of the brain.
Thankfully there is Lock Shape. Yes, Lock Shape. Just select that background image or any shape you want to lock into place and click the Lock Shape check box in the right-side properties area of Gliffy. The shape overlay will now have red handles, signifying the shape is now locked. Yes, no more re-positioning those background shapes and wantless Undo-ing.
(Warning: Lock shape can cause extreme excitement and spontaneous ogling at your diagram)

Friends of Gliffy - Freshbooks - We highly recommend our invoicing solution
Freshbooks is making our invoicing much more efficient and we highly recommend this as your web-based invoicing solution. We use it to manage our customers and to create and send invoices to them. It allows our customers to pay online and keeps us informed of the status of payments. We’re in the middle of integrating our back-end systems with their API which they recently launched .

They have the ability to deliver professional invoices over email and ground mail, track payments, manage disputes, record payment histories, and collect payments by check, e-check, or credit card.

Try Freshbooks now!

Gliffy Online Update

Thanks for all the feature requests. We have listened and made many updates

• Added drawing control - you can now “lock” a shape - see Clint’s tutorial above for details.
• More revision control - we now display which revision is open
• Improved Image rendering performance: Published diagrams render faster
• Easier to make horizontal and vertical lines with the straight line tool
• Added Vertical rule in user interface shapes.
• Symbol updates - There will be a lot in the future here - please fill out the poll above to tell us which new symbols you would like to see. In the mean time, we have made the following updates to our existing symbol libraries:
  Network Diagrams- Improved Network diagram symbols -New symbols include mail server symbol, mainframe symbol and database server symbol. Improvements to server symbol, laptop symbol, printer symbol and hub symbol.
  System Designers- We have enabled more entity-relationship line types.
  Floor planners- New stairs symbols in floorplan shapes and improved door symbols

Gliffy Plugin for Confluence Update - Version 1.3.3 released

• New Customers -

We welcome a number of new customers including - IBM, Bank of America, SAP LABS, Fujitsu, Sony Computer Entertainment America, Yellow Pages Group and Washington & Jefferson College. Here is a complete list of our featured customers.

• Version 1.3.3 released -

• Improved performance improvements including diagram rendering performance and plug-in start-up time
• Added document manager. Now you can open other diagrams in the system via the new document manager. This will enable you to copy and paste between different documents.
• Added drawing control - you can now “lock” a shape - see Clint’s tutorial above for details.
• More revision control - we now display which revision is open
• Improved Image rendering performance: Published diagrams render faster
• Easier to make horizontal and vertical lines with the straight line tool
• Added Vertical rule in user interface shapes.
• Symbol updates - There will be a lot in the future here - please fill out the poll above to tell us which new symbols you would like to see. In the mean time, we have do the below updates
  Network Diagrams- Improved Network diagram symbols New symbols include a mail server symbol, mainframe symbol and database server symbol. We have also made improvements to server symbol, laptop symbol, printer symbol and hub symbol.
  System Designers- We have added more entity-relationship line types.
  Floor planners- New stairs symbols and improved door symbols

Gliffy User Of The Month - We could not ask for a better video

We wanted to recognize this great Gliffy Tutorial video on Gliffy created by TecherTube user, elikeren:

How to create a storyboard in Gliffy.com and post to your blog

Gliffy in Action - Diagrams

Here are a few of our favorites:

• http://www.gliffy.com/publish/1257191/L - System Design
• http://www.gliffy.com/publish/1257860/L - System Design / Business Work flow
• http://www.gliffy.com/publish/1257794/L - Website Wire frame
• http://www.gliffy.com/publish/1256993/L - System Architecture
• http://www.gliffy.com/publish/1256960/L - System Architecture
• http://www.gliffy.com/publish/1257107/L - System Design
• http://www.gliffy.com/publish/1257084/L - System Design
• http://www.gliffy.com/publish/1257072/L - Network Diagram
• http://www.gliffy.com/publish/1257176/L - Business Lead Generation Process
• http://www.gliffy.com/publish/1257754/L - Network Diagram

Well, that’s it for the May Gliffy Newsletter. See you next month!

Chris, Clint, Mike, Debi, and the rest of the Gliffy team.