• Fixed the rendering of ERD line endings
• Fixed flat edges on Basic and Flowchart Classic skin shapes that had no border
• Grouping of certain shapes not remembered across saves
• Link maps are now exact in published diagrams
• Moved ad banner so it doesn’t block text properties
• Added a few new templates and improved others
• BPMN Annotation line does not disappear now in SVG export
• Added a shortcut, F2, to automatically edit text on an object
• Folder list in document manager disappearing
• Added border around Account Images to better see smaller uploaded images
• Fixed a few issues around saving when someone had logged into another instance of Gliffy

Click here to see a full list of issues resolved in this release.

Happy drawing and long live Terrans!

Back in 2005 when Clint, myself, and the other founders of Gliffy were contemplating what sort of product we wanted to build for our little startup, we generally focused on one central idea. We believed that most desktop software would be moving onto the web, and by leveraging our unique experience of building rich web applications, we could be a significant part of that movement.

When Google announced the Google Apps Marketplace earlier this year, a huge advancement in this movement was made. The barriers to getting small businesses on board with the web based software movement had been reduced dramatically, and we knew that it was important to integrate with this exciting new delivery platform to help fulfill our original vision.

Let’s back up for a moment… what is Google Apps? Google Apps is a Google product where by Google will host your organization’s email in one place, AND all the members of your organization can also get access to the other Google Apps such as spreadsheets, presentations, and more. At Gliffy, for example, we use Google Apps for our email (via Gmail), and it saves us the hassle of having to run our own mail server. With Gmail at the center of this experience, Google Apps becomes a natural portal for launching into other web based applications.

The Google Apps Marketplace is a one stop shop that lists additional web based applications, created by third party vendors, who integrate with Google Apps. Gliffy is now one of those web based applications that works with Google Apps!

How to add Gliffy to your Google Apps Domain

Here’s how it works:

If you use Google Apps, and you are an administrator of your Google Apps domain, you can add Gliffy to your Google Apps by clicking on this button:

Click on the “Add it now” button on the Gliffy Listing page. From there, you can either create a new Gliffy account to link to your Google Apps Domain, or link an existing Gliffy account to your Google Apps Domain. After you’ve set everything up, make sure you enabled Gliffy in your Google Apps Management Dashboard or already did so in the setup process. Finally, make sure to refresh your Gmail browser window, and you should see Gliffy show up under the “more” menu. You can now log into Gliffy and create diagrams straight from your Google Apps without logging into Gliffy! Here is a great video that explains this process in more detail.

This is just the beginning. There are many great integration points with Google that we plan to leverage in the future. If you have some specific ideas about how we could integrate better with Google, or have any other feedback, please let us know!

If you like Gliffy, please write a review!

If you like what you see, please write a positive review about Gliffy on the Gliffy Google Apps Marketplace Listing Page. Thanks!

With the first quarter of 2010 behind us, we’ve taken a look at the progress we’ve made as a company, and it’s just amazing. We started Gliffy almost exactly 5 years ago in my living room, and now we’ve got great customers, a real office, revenue, and awesome employees and contractors who have helped us grow the business in so many ways.

2005 photo of Chris and Clint working out some of the math that was programed into Gliffy

In 2010 we’ve already accomplished some truly fantastic milestones:

Customers – Without you, we wouldn’t be here. Keep the great feedback coming! Gliffy Online now has over 500,000 registered users. Half a million. Wow!
Product – We’ve made huge strides in increasing the quality and features of our product. Our Gliffy Online customers have been enjoying the faster performance, improved quality, and new features that started rolling out in January and have been continuing to come in the last few months. Our Confluence Plugin and JIRA Plugin customers will see these same benefits in our best plugins ever, which we’ll be releasing early next week.
Revenue – Is the economy roaring back? We think so. Our Q1 2010 bookings have increased by over 50% since Q4 2009 despite lots of new competition in the marketplace. Holy smokes! This is the ultimate indicator that we may be at an inflection point for growth and that we are clearly the market leader. We’re investing this money directly back into the company to help improve the product in many ways.
Team – We moved into a new office in San Francisco last month, and we are now expanding our kick-ass team so that we can keep improving our offering for our customers. Keep you eyes open or follow the gliffy twitter feed as we announce job openings.
Funding (or lack there of) – Gliffy was the first to market with an easy to use web based diagramming solution that helps customers add rich visuals to their documents, and we did it without raising any outside funding at all. I can’t say we’ll never raise money, but the fact that we’re cash flow positive today (and have been for several years) means we’re going to be here for a long time to come.
Competition – 2009 brought us an increase in competition, which has served to validate our class of drawing tool as a valuable one for customers. This hasn’t shaken our confidence one bit. Gliffy is THE leader in this space and the only reasonable choice for customers given that our competition either depends on funding to keep the lights on, or represent one man shops. Gliffy, on the other hand, is growing at a rapid pace, and will be here for the long haul.

To our customers, thank you! We have lots of great stuff to share with you in the coming months so stay tuned.

To our Employees, keep up the good work! We’re just getting started with this little company that we’re so proud of.

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!!

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

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!

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!

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!

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 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!