2010 has already been a crazy and productive year at Gliffy. We’ve successfully moved our office headquarters into a beautiful new space that will surely invigorate our creative juices, and we’ve also been busy improving the quality and usability of Gliffy Online. These improvements include upgrading our server architecture, eliminating many of the rare yet complex bugs that our system and helpful customers notify us of, and tweaking our interface so that you can create more impressive diagrams with ease.

You’ve probably already noticed that we’ve vastly improved the output of our exported PNG images and the look of the published diagram landing pages. For images, the text and colors should now be accurate with what you see in the editor, and you can still export up to our 5000 x 5000 pixel limit. Also, the SVG export feature provides inline images (no more zip files) and handles all international characters correctly.

The other big improvement is with our Connector/Line tool. Our old version of the connector tool seemed to have a mind of it’s own at times. The new connector tool will now route itself in ways that you would expect, and you can make adjustments to a segmented line and those adjustments will stick when moving connected shapes. Also, you can now add rounded corners to the right-angle segmented lines. This should be ideal for Business Process diagrams or for making your flowcharts look more elegant. With a line selected, you will notice a new “Line Type” property drop-down in the Line Properties area on the top right of Gliffy. To top it off, we’ve added more connection points to commonly used shapes like rectangles, processes, etc.

Here are links to a vast list of the other bugs we’ve fixed and improvements we’ve made:

• JIRA ISSUES – SWF9B
• JIRA ISSUES – SWF9C
• JIRA ISSUES – SWF9D

We’ve got some really exciting things we’re working on in the next few months, so stay tuned!!

The entire Gliffy staff is proud to provide our Gliffy Users with (drum roll please) the Gliffy User Manual

Now, as you work on your complicated Network Diagrams or fancy Flow Charts, you can easily search for basic how-to’s, hints, tips and features in the Gliffy User Manual. We still cant help with shoveling snow, but we are happy to provide you with a way to navigate our application.

The current manual covers Gliffy Online, Gliffy Confluence Plugin, Gliffy JIRA Plugin. Wondering how to add links to your diagram or publish your diagram — It’s all in the manual.

Thanks to all for their hard work on pulling this long-awaited feature from a JIRA issue to reality.

Keep those suggestions for features coming — we love to create the program you love!

–Your Gliffy Team

Today we did a major update of Gliffy Online. Gliffy Online now requires the Flash Player 9 to run. This upgrade now gives Gliffy greater performance and usability. We’ve seen at least a double in performance gain in many key areas of the application. The upgrade to Flash Player 9 also helps us to continue to focus on improving the quality of Gliffy Online. Already, significant enhancements have been made in this release that include an improved zoom feature, right-click options, easier page navigation and better usability with shape drag and drop.

Additional New Features:

• Improved Zoom – Huge performance boost and accuracy of position
• New Right Click Menu options:
  • For shapes: cut, copy, delete, send to front/back, lock
  • For lines: cut, copy, delete
  • For the page: Paste at mouse position and zoom levels
• Shortcut Key: CTRL + + to Zoom In and CTRL + – to zoom out
• Enable Zoom with CTRL+Mouse-wheel
• Workspace automatically scrolls when drag objects outside of parameters of screen
• Have page scroll when moving shape beyond viewable boundaries
• Ability to scroll page with arrow keys
• Position text below uploaded images, as default
• Enable scroll wheel for zooming and scrolling page.
• Shift + Drag when rotating makes rotation work in 15 degree increments.
• Swimlane stencils added to Flowchart shapes.
• Swimlane stencils added to UML Shapes.
• List shortcuts in a quick list window – Click on the Help button on the top right of Gliffy to see a list of shortcuts
  

Bug Fixes:

Please see our JIRA bug tracker for fixes for this release.

HAPPY DRAWING!

Look, friend. I don’t want to tell you how to go about your business. There are all kinds of different ways to live and who’s to say which is right and which is wrong?

That said, you probably wanted to give Gliffy’s floor plan software a shot before taking it to this level. It’s free, so if you want to get the tattoo afterwards, you’re not going to be any more in the red.

I mean, what if you want to move? Are you going to need to pay an architect to redesign your arm?

I wish that this was the worst example of body art available on the site F**k No Tattoos, but it is not, not by a long shot.

This, however, may be the worst flowchart I’ve seen. And they say health insurance reform is confusing. Pfft. Not when you have handy charts like this! Thank you Congress!

Go on, you know you want to try it.

I know that you — a flowchart and diagram aficionado — have been reading this blog and thinking, “I could make something as good as what they’re featuring here.”

Well, of course you could! It’s as easy as connecting the dots, all you need is an idea and an internet connection.

Gliffy is not only free to try and use directly through your web browser, there are actually rewards for giving the software a go. Yep, that’s right! Your creation could be featured on this blog where it’s sure to become viral and make you as famous as this guy.

All you have to do is sign in to Gliffy, create your flowchart, and then click the “blog & share this diagram” button in the upper right corner. That will give you the option to make your creation public. Once you do, just copy the link it gives you into the comments on this blog. I’ll check out your creations and post the ones that make the cut. If you include your email / web address, we may even do a little feature on you, too.

This is a standing offer. Good flowcharts deserve an audience like you, especially if they’re created by an audience like you!

What’s that? You want a flowchart to laugh at today as well? No problem.

This one was originally posted on scordit.

Although really, you know you’re gonna buy it no matter what the flowchart says. How could you resist?

Now, enough talk; go try Gliffy out and make us a funny flowchart!

That’s how the song goes; One for the money, two for the show, three to get ready, now go cat, go!

It isn’t quite as easy as one-two-three, though, if you’re talking about seeing your pretty face on TV. Sure, you could get lucky (or vastly unlucky) and get noticed by some local news station. But to really break through — and we’re talking international, multi-channel, written-in-history type television stardom — you need more.

That’s why we made this helpful Gliffy original flowchart.

click image to see full-size flowchart

See you on television! Happy Halloween!

The web is currently flooded with solutions based around editing, sharing, and distributing text documents in blogs, wikis, or other content management systems. Unfortunately, most of the existing solutions don’t offer ways to quickly add visuals to these text documents. The new Gliffy API aims to change this situation by making it both simple and secure for third party application developers to add Gliffy drawing features to their existing web based software.

The Gliffy Wordpress Plugin

For example, we’ve created a Wordpress Plugin to make it easy to add great looking diagrams in a blog post with almost no effort at all. Building this integration took us only about a week to build because we’ve also developed both PHP and Java Client Libraries (and a Ruby library is coming soon) which make API implementations very fast.

Would you like to add diagramming capabilities to your web application? Take a look at the Gliffy API today!

Senior Server Side Engineer at http://www.gliffy.com

Overview

Gliffy, a San Francisco based provider of web based business drawing software, is seeking a Senior Server Side Developer to focus on our J2EE architecture. The developer will be responsible for adding new features, scaling up, and
maintaining our server side architecture.

About Gliffy

Gliffy, founded in 2005, is a profitable software company with a focus on building a sustainible business model around our net-native drawing tool. Prior to founding Gliffy, Chris Kohlhardt and Clint Dickson were involved in the
technical side of building high-profile web applications such as Orbitz.com, Toyota.com, and the ColorSmart application by Behr.

• We use tools and philosphies to work smarter and more efficiently
• We work hard, but try to have fun while we do it
• We’re constantly pushing the bounds of what web applications are capable of, keeping the job challenging and interesting
• We’re excited about what we’re working on, and we hope you will be too!

Qualifications

The candidate MUST be local to the San Francisco area, and should expect to come to our San Francisco office during normal business hours. The candidate MUST have the following experience:

• Minimum 5 years Software Development experience
• Developing database driven Java/J2EE web applications deployed to Tomcat
• Working with SQL
• Test driven development
• Deploying Java applications to Linux/Unix servers
• Writing and maintaining ant build scripts
• Supporting end users who are having problems with the software
• Using wikis or other web based collaborative software

The ideal candidate MUST be willing to learn about, or already have experience with the following:

• MySQL and Hibernate
• PHP,Ruby,Perl and other languages
• REST API’s
• Continuous integration servers such as Bamboo or Cruise Control
• OAuth
• Agile development philosophies
• Managing small teams of remote or local developers
• Implementing COMET support

More about the position

The candidate will be responsible for managing all aspects of the server side infrastructure of Gliffy. For the most part, this means you’ll be working on adding features to our REST API that is powered by our J2EE application
server. The candidate must be a self starter and able to thrive in a startup environment where requirements are not always clearly laid out in advance. You should be pretty good at simplifying problems, and pushing back on features
if they seem excessive…. we’re ok with simplifying features if it means we can get the new version of the product completed sooner! As an early employee in the company, you’ll be expected to take on many roles. You’ll often be
called upon to work on new or existing features, or manage other employees / contractors to do the same.

You’ll be:

• Writing lots of server side Java code
• Managing the continuous integration builds of our products
• Architecting new features with the rest of the team
• Managing other developers

You should definitely be a team player. You should always be always asking yourself “How can we do better?”, and communicate your findings to the rest of the team in a constructive way.

Submitting your Resume

Qualified candidates should email their resume in PDF format to jobs (at) gliffy (dot) com

We are proud to announce a significant update to Gliffy Online. This update includes the new BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) symbol library and account folder management. Other features include website login, an easier sign up and payment process, and no more 5 diagram limit for free accounts! We also did a major revamp of our server-side code that will give better performance, reliability, and scalability in the long run.

BPMN Symbol Library
Gliffy now allows you to create detailed Business Process Modeling Notation diagrams. These diagrams are helpful in getting stakeholders a clear picture of your business processes. This symbol library includes events, activities, artifacts, gateways and swimlanes, as well as the specific connectors. The multi-lane swimlane symbols have adjustable lanes and the pool headers auto-resize with text input. Most of the new BPMN symbols allow their line and fill color to be user-defined.






Folders for document organization

Due to popular demand by our users, the Document Manager now allows you to organize your Gliffy diagrams into folders. The folders will show in a familiar tree structure on the left hand side. Clicking a folder will list the diagrams in that folder to the right. Want to move a diagram to another folder? Just click and drag it to that folder. Note: If you were using our previous tagging system to organize documents, these tags will be converted to folders under the top level folder called “Account Documents”. Also, any documents that were collaborated with you will be located under “Shared Documents”. Refer to the issues below for more information on the inclusion of folders and the conversion from tags:

• http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-551
• http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-551

Folder Permissions

With the addition of folders for organizing diagrams, Gliffy Online also gives administrators of Premium accounts the ability to add and remove user access/permissions to specific folders in the account. This feature can be found in the Account Manager, accessible to admins from the Document Manager.

No more 5 diagram limit!

When you sign up for Gliffy, you now get a free 30-day trial of our Premium product. This allows you to create unlimited public and private diagrams during the trial period. When the trial period is over, you can still create unlimited public diagrams.

Website and Secure Login

We’ve also added the ability to login to the Gliffy Online application from anywhere on our website. What this allows you to do is use your browser or operating system features to remember the email and password for login. This way, you can now access the document manager with 1-click from the website.

Premium accounts can now login securely. Logging in securely means all data between Gliffy and our servers is encrypted using SSL. This feature is only available to Premium accounts. Please note, running Gliffy in secure mode can cause a decrease in performance, as passing data over a network using the https protocol is slower.

Other Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Legacy Network Shapes have lost connection points - http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-872
• Symbol does not change with resizing: Network / Home Network / Server – http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-871
• Network Cloud shape is blurry when large, especially in expored images and svg – http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-773
• Flowchart multidocument image element has inconsistant colouring – http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-659
• Selection UI control for checkboxes and radio buttons should be a checkbox, not a drop down box. – http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-629
• Color picker for all UI symbols doesn’t function – http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-626
• Color Picker UI symbol doesn’t change color – http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-625
• Video player UI symbol should have a large ‘play’ button in the center (just like youtube does) – http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-624
• Vertical justification of text for ‘Image’ UI shape should be at the top of the shape (but not above it) – http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-623
• Color should be removed from UI symbols that have color – http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-621
• List Box UI symbol should have a scrollbar in it – http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-620
• An account containing exactly 10 users can’t purchase a 10 user account – http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-584
• Text Names for symbols in Symbol Palette left justifies when multiline – http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-573
• The label for the “login” button is moving towards left, when it is clicked more than once. – http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-15

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