My family ability to garden was not passed to me. I got plenty of passion between watching my father expertly set up the automatic watering systems and following my grandfather down the rows of vegetables he nurtured across the street from his house. These memories excite me for the potential of growing my own food each spring. Unfortunately, I have a rather mighty obstacle: I lack the skill to bring vegetables into the world. I plan using Gliffy’s floor plan software, but rare is a vegetable to grow.
Honestly, I am lucky to produce one zucchini.
Never fear, a solution is near. This summer I decide to embrace my passion and forgo the growing: I joined our local CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) Farm, Gullywash Gardens. If the concept of a CSA is new to you, here is a simple process flow explanation:
As you can see, the process has plenty of choices along the way. Using Gliffy not only helped our family to make a decision, but it helped to explain the process to our friends.
The end result is that I am enjoying locally, lovingly grown food, I’m not buying food shipped from across the country (or world!) and I can relax as my lackluster garden doesn’t produce because I’m enjoying plenty of food my expert farmers are growing. In the near future Gliffy will have BPMN symbols to assist in the documenting and analysis process. Lucky for me, using Gliffy’s Flow Chart software, the swimlane decision shape showed this was the right choice.

It feels good to put the experiences of Barbara Kingsolverand Michael Pollan into action, the folks at Gullwash Gardens are fantastic and it tastes great!

Lately, I’ve been working on implementing a new symbol library, our BPMN symbols. We’ve been using a graphic designer in Brazil, and Gliffy has played a big part in making the communication process to get the symbol assets developed a snap (which is kind of unfortunate because I’d really love to have a reason to go to Brazil on business).

To start the symbol design process, we give our designer a list of symbols we want done, some inspirational mock-ups or examples and ideas on style, and he then gives us a single image of his design. Once we approve the design, I let him know how we want them delivered (various .swf and .svg files). For our more complicated symbols, I need to give him a guide on how certain assets are cut. For instance certain parts of a symbol may “stretch”, while other parts may not. So I’ll need the asset cut into those parts. This is where Gliffy has sped up the process. I’ll create a guide of how these symbol assets should be cut and organized in Gliffy and share the diagram with the designer. Below are some snippets from these diagrams.

As with the Horizontal Scrollbar above from our user interface library, after our designer gave us a design image of the complete symbol, I was able to bring that into Gliffy using the image import feature. I then laid out how the symbol is cut into multiple assets. The nice thing is that I don’t need to bring the symbol image into photoshop or anything to cut it up. I just use Gliffy’s “visual magic” by overlaying a white rectangle to cover up any areas I don’t want shown. (so asset #2 is the same as asset #1 with a white rectangle over the right). This makes producing the design so much faster. And the added bonus is, its easy to make revisions or revert in Gliffy, and our designer always has the latest revision.

My girlfriend and I recently decided to move in together, sharing my 2-bedroom condo in Washington, DC. The master bedroom is currently my “man-cave” (which houses the equipment to support my expensive pro audio hobby). Its generous walk-in closet is a pack-rat’s dream, holding, among other things, four boxes of G.I. Joe toys, five of Star Wars, my Atari 2600, Commodore 64 and an Amiga 500. Plus, the box to everything I’ve owned in the last 10 years. When my girlfriend actually saw this closet (which is off limits to just about everyone), she suggested the radical notion of using it to store our clothes. This meant swapping the bedroom and man-cave.

First thing I did was to create my man-cave in Gliffy. The floorplan symbols made this a snap (Although Gliffy doesn’t have inches just yet, multiplying feet by 50 gave me plenty of room to work). The before picture is a pretty accurate view of this crowded room. While most of the furniture in there would be going, some would be staying, like my workdesk (where I’ve been hard at work on Gliffy’s developer API). We also needed to fit in my girlfriend’s armchair and ottoman. We were definitely having a hard time visualizing where things would go and even if they would all fit.

I did a quick redesign of the room and used Gliffy’s collaboration feature to send it to my girlfriend. We share calendars with Google Calendar, and have planned our vacations with Google Docs, so she instantly knew what to do when she got the email from Gliffy. She made a few adjustments and we decided on a layout that should fit everything nicely.

The “new” man-cave was a bit trickier; the room is smaller and oddly shaped, and it still needed to accommodate a couch and chair (I’ll often have two or three local band members in there during mixing sessions, and folding chairs just don’t cut it) Fortunately, everything seems to fit (and I might have a bona-fide vocal booth; much to the delight of my upstairs neighbor).

I’m pretty confident we’ve just reduced the move-in stress by quite a bit, and hopefully staved off our first domestic argument (odds are now on my cat eating her plants).

We’ve just released a minor update to the Gliffy Plugin for Confluence today which includes several bug fixes, a small feature, and Confluence 2.9 compatibility. We recommend this update for users of Confluence versions 2.6 and better. Download the update here.

Highlights of this release:

Confluence 2.9 Compatibility

Atlassian has made significant improvements to the plugin architecture of Confluence in the upcoming 2.9 release. Our plugin needed some modifications to ensure compatibility, which we’ve implemented in this release.

Option to turn border off

We’ve added a small new feature in this release which will enable you to turn off the border in a Gliffy diagram in a Confluence page. Simply add ‘border=false’ to your {gliffy} macro, and the border will be turned off.

Detailed Release Notes

• [GLIFFY-15] - The label for the "login" button is moving towards left, when it is clicked more than once.
• [GLIFFY-662] - Breadcrumbs on view large diagram action are broken
• [GLIFFY-680] - showgliffyeditor.action should fail gracefully when user doesn’t have permissions
• [GLIFFY-685] - ‘Remove Diagram’ link should not show if user doesn’t have Remove Attachments permission
• [GLIFFY-705] - GPFC Document Manager shouldn’t have a ‘public’ column
• [GLIFFY-706] - Add Diagram links don’t show up for the non default themes with for Gliffy 1.4, Confluence 2.8
• [GLIFFY-709] - Remove link should be shown when user has permission to edit page
• [GLIFFY-711] - Improve null checks in confluence extractor
• [GLIFFY-748] - Group Function Not Working
• [GLIFFY-789] - Reference to nonexistent action in LargeDiagram.vm
• [GLIFFY-798] - Clicking on diagram image results in page not found
• [GLIFFY-801] - In some cases, symbols fail to load in editor
• [GLIFFY-638] - Remove the ‘requires restart’ checks from the confluence macro and actions
• [GLIFFY-660] - Remove pre 2.6 elements from atlassian-plugin.xml
• [GLIFFY-661] - Confluence 2.9 compatibility
• [GLIFFY-461] - Edit/Remove Border to Gliffy Diagram in Page
• [GLIFFY-695] - Setup bamboo for 1.4.1 branch
• [GLIFFY-751] - Remove Struts from Plugin

Gliffy is a ‘virtual business’. This means we don’t have a physical office from which we work out of. In fact, we have contractors and employees working for us who live all over the world:

One of the challenges we have to deal with in a virtual office environment is how to handle incoming snail mail. We receive snail mail for all sorts of stuff:

• Checks from customers
• Bills from credit cards and vendors we work with
• Bank statements

Originally, we had all this snail mail sent to my apartment here in San Francisco, but recently the influx of mail started to become overwhelming. Fortunately, about a year ago we signed up for a nifty remote mail service called Earth Class Mail.

What is a remote mail service? The basic idea is that it’s a service which scans all of your physical snail mail and makes it available online. The process looks something like this:

• Mail is received by secure mail handling facility
• Depending on the addressee, the mail is sorted into the correct virtual mailbox automatically
• An email is sent to notify the recipient mail has arrived
• Mail facility scans the item
• Recipient reads the mail

By using Earth Class Mail , we have drastically reduced the time it takes to handle mail in our business. This diagram below shows the process flow of mail at Gliffy.

We get several benefits from handling our mail this way:

• Mail is automatically sorted - nobody has to spend time sorting the mail that comes in, and this saves us time.
• The intended recipient knows that the mail came in right away via email
• Snail mail can be read from anywhere - Since all the mail is scanned and online, we can read the mail from anyplace we can access the internet
• All mail is archived and easily accessible online anytime we need it
• If I ever move, we wont have to spend a bunch of time notifying our customers of our new address since our mailing address doesn’t need to change.

As a small business owner, I’ve benefited the most from this system. I used to spend a few hours a week dealing with mail, keeping it organized, and depositing checks as they came in. Now, we’ve been able to delegate these tasks in an efficient manner without loosing physical control of the mail itself.