In this issue:

• New feature in Gliffy Online: Yahoo image search
• Clint’s Drawing Tip o’ the month: Diagram resizing
• Gliffy Plugin for Confluence 1.1.0 released
• Gliffy in action: Some of our favorite diagrams
• Green and Good Stuff: MADRE

New feature in Gliffy Online: Yahoo! image search

Ok, so this one is actually a feature we released last month. We had so much fun news to share last month, I ran out of space. Actually, I didn’t want to ramble on and on and on about a million different things and have you all get bored to the point that you would just hit ‘delete’. umm… are you still with me?

Anyway, Yahoo! image search! Inside Gliffy Online, you can now search for images using the Yahoo! search engine. Simply click on the “Image Search” tab on the left, enter a search term, and you get instant images to add to your diagram. Cool, eh?

Clint’s Drawing Tip o’ the month - Diagram resizing

Tired of small diagrams? Is 576px width by 754px height cramping your style and limiting your creative juices from spilling out on the Gliffy canvas (clean up on aisle 7 please!!)? Is your house bigger than the Gliffy floor plan page will allow? Would you like to include all steps of the process but your flow chart ran over the page? Well, worry no more! Just use our handy Page Properties on the top right of Gliffy to change the page width and page height to whatever you need. Want to print to a Landscape layout? No problem. Click the File menu and select Print Setup, then change the Printer Paper to your paper size and select Landscape. Click OK and then with the page breaks turned on (small checkbox also in the page properties area), increase your page width and height until you see the thick blue lines. These lines let you know where the printer page edges are. Then just click the print icon and make sure your printer settings are set to print to landscape mode. It’s that easy! (OK, maybe not that easy, but we’re going to work on making it easier in the future)

Gliffy Plugin for Confluence 1.1.0 released

Once again, here’s a spiffy video showing the Gliffy Plugin for Confluence is use:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYLabE6cfBE&eurl=

For each new release of the plugin, we’ll either fix bugs, roll in features from the ‘core’ Gliffy diagram editor, or add in specific features that plugin users have requested. In the 1.1.0 release, which came out February 1st, we added in Unicode support, image linking, and fixed a bunch of small bugs.

Gliffy in The Real World: Some of our favorite diagrams

What are people doing with Gliffy? Here are a few examples of diagrams that people have created:

One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight

Green & Good Stuff - MADRE

Special thanks to our friend Kathryn A. for telling us about MADRE. From their web site:

“We work with women who are affected by violations to help them win justice and, ultimately, change the conditions that give rise to human rights abuses. And we challenge US policies that undermine human rights.”

http://www.madre.org/

These people are doing some great work helping fight for human rights for women. Please consider making a donation.

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

Chris, Clint, and the rest of the Gliffy team

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

If you’re developing an OpenLaszlo application, and you’re worried about performance, like we are, you’ll be happy to know that Macromedia’s Flash Player 8 offers significant performance improvements. Click here to download the public beta.

I’m not sure if Laszlo Systems would approve of this, but I found something that improves the speed of rendering views that are changing their dimensions or positions rapidly. In our application, we need to resize and move many views all at the same time, repeatedly. During all this, we also need to adjust xoffset and yoffset since these views might be rotated. All this view morphing puts a heavy strain on the system, and performance noticeably suffers as a result. I was poking around in the OpenLaszlo source code, and discovered that when you set the xoffset or yoffset attributes using setAttribute(), setX() and setY() are invoked internally.

Our code looked something like this:

   while( aBunchOfTimes ) {
        //setX() and setY() invoked internally by LzView
        someView.setAttribute('xoffset', someView.width/2 );
        //setX() and setY() invoked internally by LzView
        someView.setAttribute('yoffset', someView.height/2 );
        someView.setX( anewx );
        someView.setY( anewy );
    }

In the above case, setX() and setY() are being invoked a total of 6 times. It turns out that setX() and setY() and costly enough operations that this is worth optimizing. How do we speed things up? I went ahead and changed the above code to look something like this:

   while( aBunchOfTimes ) {
        someView.xoffset = someView.width/2;
        someView.yoffset = someView.height/2;
        someView.setX( anewx );
        someView.setY( anewy );
    }

What’s going on here? setAttribute(’xoffset’) and setAttribute(’yoffset’) cause internal functions to be invoked which in turn invoke setX() and setY(). If you assign a value to xoffset and yoffset directly, as I’ve shown in this last example, the internal functions are not invoked. When I finally do invoke setX() and setY() on my own, the OpenLaszlo view system does whatever it needs to do with xoffset and yoffset to keep everything in order. It turns out this simple change made a very noticeable performance improvement in our application. (Clint said, “It’s smooth like butter!”)

Yay for open source!

It’s important to note that this optimization now depends on specific internal behavior of the OpenLaszlo view system. Obviously, this goes against the rules of code abstraction, and we run the risk that our application might break if the internal workings of the OpenLaszlo view system change significantly. In our first round of user testing, we found that performance was a significant factor in making happy users, so we think this risk is worth it.

Get ready folks, Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s) will soon have you doing things on the web which you thought were only possible with desktop applications. These new web based applications will soon have you collaborating in ways you never thought possible, increasing the overall efficiency of companies in many ways. Here are a few interesting reads which all point in this general direction:

• Jason Fried of 37Signals predicts that most innovative software in the next 10 years will be web based
• Robert X. Cringly suggests “After a decade of messing around, thin client computing is almost inevitable for businesses. “
• Evan Williams of Odeo posted a while back about running your company on web apps.
• Michael Sica of Ataraxis Software will be developing his Project Management software using OpenLaszlo. I think you’re on the right track Michael, and I can’t wait to see what you come up with!

What could this all mean? I have a few predictions:

• As RIA alternatives begin to arrive on the scene in the next 1-2 years, progressive folks will stop using traditional desktop applications, including ALL Microsoft Office products.
• Lighter weight RIA alternatives to traditional desktop applications will offer collaboration opportunities far beyond those which are available in their desktop counterparts.
• Microsoft knows this trend is in the works, and will be mostly helpless to stop it until Windows Vista has greater market share.
• Many of Microsoft’s big money making software titles will be threatened. Microsoft stock will take a big hit when this trend becomes clear to the masses.
• Microsoft will find a way to create problems for RIA’s. A few possible scenarios:
  • The new version of IE will break existing AJAX RIA’s in subtle ways
  • The new version of IE wont play well with Flash, causing trouble for Flash based RIA’s like OpenLaszlo and Flex applications
  • Microsoft will create and bundle it’s own Flash player, breaking Flash based RIA’s which threaten their desktop application dominance.
• SocialText and JotSpot will be leading the charge (if they don’t get acquired by Yahoo or Google first)

What do you think?