- Rick Broida, Computer Shopper - “Sure, you could shell out big bucks for Microsoft Visio—or you could use Gliffy for all your diagramming needs.”
- Chris Harris, School Library Journal - “…an upstart Web site just might have what it takes to knock down a long established software package.”
- KPIX covers STIRR - Gliffy is mentioned in this local TV piece
- Paul Veneziam, InfoWorld - Gliffy makes it look easy
- Rafe Needleman, CNet - Gliffy, the online Visio killer
- Kate Russell, BBC World - “…a brilliant tool…”
- Lifehacker - “Whether you’re creating flow charts, floor plans, or pretty much anything you’d consider a diagram, Gliffy actually looks like it can handle it.”
- Saeed Richardson, Duke Univ. Macromedia Users Group - “Don’t have Visio? Try gliffy.com!”
- Pete Cashmore at Mashable - “it’s far superior to anything else out there”
- Solution Watch - “Overall, Gliffy was not only very helpful for creating diagrams, but I also found it being a lot of fun to use.”
- Michael Sica - “gliffy is pretty impressive.”
- Fred Cavazza (english translation) - translated quote: “…very impressive.”
- A Zulu In Silicon Valley - “This is really cool if you’re looking to share flowcharts, 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.”
- David Warlick - “Very cool”
- Roger Kondrat - “Finally a product that is easy to use…”
- Snoring how to stop - “Very fun.”
- REMC Ramblings - “I really like it.”
- Leigh Blackall - Teach and Learn Online - I love this tool. Gliffy.com I love you!!
- Solo Technology - I’d say these guys have the diagramming slice of web office apps cornered.
- snipperoo - “Very nicely implemented.”
- The Tech Savvy Educator - “Gliffy is everything a concept mapping tool should be…”
- Google Blogsearch for Gliffy
- Technorati search for gliffy

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!

For previous beta users of Gliffy, we wanted to let you know that we’ve recently released a significant update to the software. This release has fixes to numerous bugs, performance enhancements, as well as some new features. These include:

- Rich text
- Drop shadows
- Gradients
- Publishing

With publishing, you can embed an image of your Gliffy diagram in your webpage, blog, or wiki. Plus, if you change the diagram, this change will automatically update in the image.

So if you have a login already and haven’t given Gliffy a spin in a while, go check it out. If you don’t have a login yet, sign up on our Beta list at http://www.gliffy.com.

And as always, we truly appreciate feedback. Send comments or bugs to support@gliffy.com.

Thanks!

Interested in including easy end user drawing capabilities into your web based application? Gliffy is now offering the same drawing toolkit that our diagram editor is based on as a licensable code module. Here are some example applications for our drawing toolkit:

- Describe a workflow
- Visually describe a process
- Draw simple pictures
- Layout furniture in a room
- Layout landscape
- Layout a user interface
- Describe a software architecture

Email chrisk(at)gliffy(dot)com for more information.

For folks who are curious, SilverTie Software is now officially Gliffy Inc. If you’re subscribed to the SilverTieBlog RSS feed, you should be redirected to the new feed without doing a thing. On to new and better things…

Sam at Writely kicks off a conversation about a common interoperability API between all these new applications popping up. We totally agree that such an API would make applications such as ours way more useful. Here are some examples of how such an API might be used:

• You’re composing a blog entry, and want to incorporate a spreadsheet from NumSum to get a point across.
• You’re working on a business plan in gOffice and you want to plug in some photos of the founders directly from Flickr.
• When working on a document in Writely, and you want to refer to a project management schedule in Basecamp.

With open API’s, you could certainly build custom integrations between all of these pieces. However, imagine if there was a a single standard API that everyone used for the general case, making integration a snap!

Here are some features I’d like to see in such an API:

• Single sign on and Identity management, using an open standard
• Ability to list and select resources from other services (Maybe using OPML)
• Ability to easily import documents from one service, and embed them in another, even if the imported document is not publicly published to the world.
• All the while keeping in mind that the user experience must be easy and seamless

This isn’t the only type of integration imagined by folks. For example, GoingOn is a manifestation of an idea Marc Cantor has often talked about: The Digital Lifestyle Aggregator.

Update: Sam has created a Writely doc to get the ball rolling on this. If you’re interested in collaborating on this, drop him a line.

I read two blog posts recently, both from VC’s, which show folks are starting to grok the reality that collaborative internet based applications will soon be the tools of choice, replacing traditional desktop applications.

Fred Wilson writes:

“…my experience and my bet is that wikis will take the enterprise by storm. Because they are simpler, easier, and better.”

Peter Rip predicts:

“The AJAX version of Office is coming. But the key isn’t AJAX. The key is the apps will naturally collaborate the way we have all learned to work - via the Web.”

“…I bet in five years more people use AJAX Office than Microsoft Office.”

We couldn’t agree more! And Gliffy fits right in there…