With rising gas prices and Earth Day a few weeks ago, a recent CNN Money article, caught our eye. We created a Gliffy flow chart to really bring the point home.

Join the movement Green Slow Moving Vehicle Movement or read how driving slower affects the the San Francisco Bay Area commute.

Gliffy now gives you the ability to create professional looking User Interface designs to update your User Interface diagrams. We’ve upgraded many our current symbols and have added some new ones. The new and improved symbols include:

Forms and Components: Scrollbars, Window, Dialog, Listbox, Sliders, Combobox, Textbox, Button, Datepicker and Colorpicker.

Content: Area Box, Plain Box, Image, Street Map, Video Player, Progress Bar, Line Chart, Bar Chart, Column Charts.

Miscellaneous: Sticky Note, Notes Reference, Rules, and Arrows.

Note: You can set the state of the checkbox and radio button by selecting the symbol and using the “selected” dropdown located under the properties area on the right side of Gliffy.

Check out these example Gliffy Wireframe Diagrams:

OTHER BUG FIXES

* Text description of symbols on palette was left justifying when multiline (Windows browsers)
* Overlay handles will turn off when dragging shape making it easier to align small shapes
* Fixed Save issue when a diagram has an uploaded image that has an apostrophe in the name
* Fixed Premature End of File error on transcoding

Climb Against the Odds marks the ninth major mountaineering expedition to support and raise awareness for the Breast Cancer Fund’s work to eliminate the environmental causes of the disease. In June, a team of 40 women and men – breast cancer survivors and supporters – will climb Mt. Shasta, 14,162-feet, in a collective effort to prevent breast cancer and a personal challenge to overcome the devastating experience of the disease.

Clint’s mom, a breast cancer survivor herself, is one of the climbers this year, and will be attempting two difficult things. One, is to summit Mt. Shasta. The other is to raise $10,000 for the Breast Cancer Fund in the form of donations. Gliffy, Inc. was proud to donate to the Breast Cancer Fund this year in support of her climb.

If you are interested in finding out more information or want to support the Breast Cancer Fund, please visit her Climb Against the Odds homepage here:

https://www.kintera.org/faf/donorReg/donorPledge.asp?ievent=256952&supid=198557308

Go Hillie!

On Monday we’ll be moving to a new data center. This new data center will feature enhanced security, a redundant network, and improved hardware for the core Gliffy application. Unfortunately, we’ll experience no more than about 2 hours of down time during the move as we transfer data to the new system.

Thank you for your patience as we upgrade our system!

-chris

We told you the additional shapes would come fast and furious: Here they are! We proudly announce new, high quality shapes based on your requests. Take a look at the latest shapes to improve your Floorplan Diagrams, UML Drawings and Flow Chart Diagrams:

• New Shape Library “Office Layout” (available under Floorplan tab)
• New Symbols (available under Floorplan tab):
  • Drum Set (Miscellaneous)
  • Tile and Wood Flooring (Structure)
  • Table with 4 chairs (Dining room)
  • Single Love Seat (Living room)
  • Elevator (Structure)
• Swimlane shape (available under Flowchart and UML)

While we were at it, we fixed the following bugs:

• Symbols under library tabs now load as one asset in order to increase performance of loading.
• Issue when loading diagram with a searched image that is not available, the hourglass would not go away.
• Issue of diagram image generation failing when an uploaded image was inserted with no file handle.
• Issue of a shape with zero width and text causing a memory spike when processing text wrapping function for SVG generation.
• Issue of text editing not working for rotated Multi-Part SVG Shape.

Log in to Gliffy now to check out the new shapes for yourself!

Until next month keep sharing your needs for shape libraries,

Chris, Clint, Mike, Debi, and the rest of the Gliffy team.

I came across these over the last few weeks, thought you might enjoy them:

“Choosy Teachers Choose Gliffy” (can’t get much better than being compared to peanut butter)

"How do you like My First Gliffy?” (we have achieved noun status)

A poem:

Here’s a blog, there’s a blog, a wiki-wiki, mindmap. 

Gliffy- moodle, tapped in, google scholar rap. 

If you want to make sense and save yourself a dime 

better get a second life or you won’t have the time.

Let us know what has caught your attention! ~Debi K

Just who is this Debi team member at Gliffy? Alas, it was not you, but us that overlooked introducing myself to all of you Gliffy drawing fanatics. Joining Gliffy in May, I jumped right into a variety of support and invoice related activities. I’m currently providing backup to Mike and Chris so they can get out more! I bring another timezone (CDT) to our team and some more X chromosomes. Looking forward to hearing from you and seeing what you draw!

Debik at Gliffy dot Com

On Wednesday we experienced approximately 1 hour and 15 minutes of server down time when our data center experienced a power failure. This problem has been resolved now, and we are very very sorry about the down time our customers experienced.

Our goal is to reduce down time as much as possible since we know access to your data is critical to you. A goal of ours in the upcoming months is to improve the reliability of our service. Expect to hear more about how we’re going to do this in the upcoming months.

Gliffy Inc., purveyor of the premier online diagram editor, is currently looking for a stellar Biz Dev guru to help us take the company to the next level.

About Gliffy

• We’re 2 developers with a grand vision
• We have bootstrapped the company for about 2 years and are now looking to expand
• We are profitable on our current product lines, and want to take the company to the next level
• We have lots of paying customers, including IBM, Apple, AOL, Adobe, Xerox, and Chevron. See our customer list for more information.

Here’s what we think your role will be and some of the qualities we’d like to see in you. Keep in mind things change pretty fast in the wacky world of startup land:

Short term:

• The purpose of this person is to help us dramatically increase sales and revenue from our current product lines
• Identify key areas in our existing sales/marketing strategies in which we can improve on
• Implement and execute on the most critical areas identified
• Develop an efficient and repeatable sales process
• Initially handle invoicing and various other duties, or manage the outsourcing of these tasks
• Must be self starter, and willing to take on tasks that may be outside core competency.
• Must be able to deal with high levels of risk in a very early stage startup.
• Must be adaptable to constantly changing conditions that are indicative of a startup
• Should be passionate about what we’re trying to do
• Should have a focus on creating a sustainable company that doesn’t involve selling out to google as our business plan. We are focused on generating more revenue using our current product lines.
• This might start out as a part time position. Help us figure out what makes sense.

Longer term:

• Help figure out high level company strategy decisions from a Sales & marketing perspective
• Take leadership role in what we hope will become a growing sales/marketing team
• Help us figure out a long term strategy that will ensure we maintain our position as the leading provider of online diagramming solutions

Compensation:
Finances are tight for us yet, so our preference is to bring on someone who is initially willing to work for a larger equity stake instead of taking salary. We would preferably tie future salary adjustments to revenue generation.

Interested? Willing to take a risk? Contact info@gliffy.com to find out more.

Next time you have an idea, try drawing it out using Gliffy instead of writing it out. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words!

In this issue:

• Gliffy is hiring a Biz Dev Guru
• Gliffy Plugin for Confluence 1.2.0 released
• Gliffy Online Premium - Still awesome as ever
• Clint’s Drawing Tip o’ the month: The power of ESC
• Gliffy in action: Some of our favorite diagrams
• Green and Good stuff: Trickle Up

Gliffy is hiring a Biz Dev Guru
Gliffy is growing!

- We have over 120,000 registered users for Gliffy Online
- The Gliffy Plugin for Confluence boasts some fantastic customers such as IBM, Apple, and AOL

We’re seeking a Biz Dev Guru to focus on marketing our online product, increase sales across all product lines, and help us take Gliffy to the next level. Interested? Do you know someone who might be interested? See our job posting for more information:

Please email info (at) gliffy (dot) com and tell us a little about yourself if this job appeals to you.

Gliffy Plugin for Confluence 1.2.0 released
Earlier this month we released version 1.2.0 of the Gliffy Plugin for Confluence. The Gliffy Plugin for Confluence merges the best Enterprise Wiki, Confluence, with the best online diagramming solution, Gliffy. Sound interesting? Here’s a 2 minute video which shows this product in action:

New with 1.2.0:
- New, more streamlined look
- Entity Relationship Diagrams
- New Admin page
- Bug fixes

Find out more

Gliffy Online Premium - Still awesome as ever

Have you been frustrated trying to share diagrams between co-workers when some of them are on a Mac and some are on a PC? Maybe you’ve also noticed not everyone has an expensive copy of Visio, making sharing and collaborating even more challenging. Gliffy Online solves these problems and more at a fraction of the cost of Visio.

Visio 2007 Standard on Amazon.com: $223
Gliffy Online Premium: $30/year

Sign up for a Premium account today!

Clint’s Drawing Tip o’ the month: The power of ESC

Many people have heard about the power of ESP, but Gliffy users might find ESC to be more powerful. The Escape (ESC) key can help you be more productive when creating your earth-shattering flow charts, floor plans, or network diagrams. Here are some ways you can use the ESC key:

1. When you are finished drawing a line and want to turn off the line tool, just hit ESC instead of finding and clicking the button with your mouse.

2. When you are adding text to a shape or with the text tool, when you are done typing, just hit ESC to bring focus back to the object you are adding text to. Hit ESC again to deselect the object or turn off the text tool.

3. If you have an any object selected, hit ESC to deselect the object.

4. Hit ESC to cancel out of any Gliffy Dialogs (where applicable).

Gliffy in action: Some of our favorite diagrams

Here are a few of our favorite diagrams & drawings we’ve seen out there:

Floorplan on a reality web site

Some sort of filter system (one) (two)

Map of historical events

Big network diagram

Just pretty

Sequence diagram (UML)

Green and Good stuff: Trickle Up

From their web site:

“Trickle Up’s mission is to help the lowest income people worldwide take the first steps up out of poverty by providing conditional seed capital, business training, and relevant support services essential to the launch or expansion of a microenterprise.”

For just $25 you can help empower small business owners around the world. Take a look at some of these great stories

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

Chris, Clint, and the rest of the Gliffy team.