From this day forth, our robot will be named Djedi, the little robot sent in to loyally discover hieroglyphs. Thanks to our winner, @danielabbas for submitting this name and to everyone else who participated!!

Here’s a little background on the origins of Djedi. Djedi is said to be the first magician, as reported by the Westcar papyrus which documents stories that were told at the time of Pharaoh Khufu in ancient Egypt. Djedi was said to eat 500 loaves of bread, a joint of meat, and drink 100 jugs of beer per day and was 110 years old. He knew the secrets of the pyramids and was fabled to have the power to cut the head off of living creatures and restore them after.

That’s a pretty awesome namesake, if you ask me!

Can’t wait to find out what our robot’s name will be!!!! Stay tuned…

In version 4 of the Gliffy Confluence Plugin, using Gliffy is as easy as using the new Confluence 4 editor. We’ve worked hard to make the editing experience as natural and as seamless as possible. No longer will you need to toggle between editing a diagram from the wiki view and updating the diagram layout from the edit view, everything happens in-line with the Confluence 4 editor.

Overview of Gliffy 4 in Atlassian’s new OnDemand service

Our Gliffy robot has a bunch of different costumes but no name :( We want YOU: our friends, colleagues, users, fans, and followers to participate in the Gliffy Robot Naming Contest! Starting today through October 31, we will be collecting any and all names via Twitter (#NameMyBot). The final winner will be announced shortly thereafter and receive a prize from Gliffy! Let the submitting begin!

]]> http://www.gliffy.com/blog/2011/10/25/name-my-bot-contest/feed/ 2 http://www.gliffy.com/blog/2011/06/02/gliffy-com-website-updated-now-with-more-robots/ http://www.gliffy.com/blog/2011/06/02/gliffy-com-website-updated-now-with-more-robots/#comments Thu, 02 Jun 2011 18:38:53 +0000 Chris Kohlhardt http://www.gliffy.com/blog/?p=1680 Continue reading →]]> Last night we pushed out a major update to our website. We’ve been working on this update for quite some time, so we’re super excited to get this out there. We’d love to hear about any feedback you might have out the new look! I wanted to send out a special thank-you to the people who made this redesign possible:

• Beate Fritsch – Fantastic Design
• Laura Khalil – Killer input on design direction and copy writing, and created videos for product pages
• XHTMLized – Most excellent HTML production
• Eric @ Gliffy – Elegantly integrated the new design into critical parts of Gliffy Online
• Todd @ Gliffy – Todd – Life savor by helping to build functionality that will enable automatic license generation for our Confluence / JIRA plugin customers.

Contextual Properties for Shape, Lines and Groups

The new Contextual Properties features gives you the power to change properties on a shape, line or group, quickly and with little hassle. No more hunting around the application interface to change a simple property, now it’s right there with one easy click. We’ve got a quick video to show you how simple and efficient it is to use the new Contextual Properties feature in Gliffy:

A few new features we’ve added within the Contextual Properties are:

• you can now change the arrows at the beginning and the end of the line independently, and we give you all arrow options based on the type of line you are drawing. For instance, if you are connecting UML shapes, we offer you the UML arrows in the selection options.
• if you have a selection that contains line, shapes and text, you can now change properties of each object type independently via the contextual properties, without having to select each object type separately.

Document Properties

Since we removed the properties area on the right hand side, we’ve moved the Document Properties content to a drop down, located on the top right of Gliffy next to the Revision History drop down. Clicking on the Document Properties drop down, gives you the same options you’ve had before, for instance, toggling the drawing guides and changing the page color and size.

Other interface changes

We’ve also removed the footer area at the bottom of Gliffy to give you more drawing space. The few elements that used to be located on the footer have moved. You can find our feedback link under the Help menu on the top right of Gliffy. You can find out more about Gliffy or contact us via the About button also located on the top right of Gliffy.

We’ve got many more exciting updates coming down the pipeline, so stay tuned!

Below is a complete list of bugs/improvements/features for this latest update:

Bug

• [GLIFFY-3381] – Folders: When any user creates a diagram, they are the only user listed for that folder
• [GLIFFY-174] – Turn off things like drop shadows even with everything selected
• [GLIFFY-378] – Revision History – Opening a revision from an edited revision with Save, opens one revision later
• [GLIFFY-3047] – Overlay points inconsistent after entering a lot of line of text in Class shape
• [GLIFFY-3119] – Overlay HUD flickers when drawing guides are turned on.
• [GLIFFY-3157] – Shape Popup not enabled when using sitemap and other templates
• [GLIFFY-3089] – Locking a shape not reflecting its changes to properties.
• [GLIFFY-3104] – Opening ERD template opens UML symbol library

Improvement

• [GLIFFY-745] – Consider that Rubberband Selection default to not include connector lines
• [GLIFFY-2239] – If a shape that has line color is selected along with a line, user should be able to select line color for both at the same time

New Feature

• [GLIFFY-2973] – Contextual Properties
• [GLIFFY-2815] – Include green org chart example as template
• [GLIFFY-190] – Have all arrowheads available in the dropdown
• [GLIFFY-2033] – Allow the user to change the line endings for UML, BPMN, etc.
• [GLIFFY-2787] – Make “Line End” feature more Apparent
• [GLIFFY-2968] – Shape properties should not be focusable when shape is locked
• [GLIFFY-2974] – Remove Footer Chrome
• [GLIFFY-3036] – Move Document Properties to Drop Down
• [GLIFFY-3039] – Physically remove old properties palette area on right

We also added a new feature that will give you immediate information when updating an object. A gray box will appear next to an object or group that will show the X and Y positioning when dragging the object, Width or Height when stretching a shape, or the angle in degrees when rotating a shape.

Finally, we’ve fixed a handful of bugs that were specific to different browsers. To see a full list of bugs fixed, and other resolved issues, please see our release notes below.

Happy diagramming!

Release Notes – Gliffy – Version Gliffy Online SWF9-R

Bug

• [GLIFFY-3010] – SVG Export fails using Opera, Window after the first download
• [GLIFFY-3017] – Flash Error when Upload Image after delete an image from the Account Images library
• [GLIFFY-3035] – Alleviate Right-Click issues with Chrome and FF4 browsers
• [GLIFFY-3068] – Fresh shapes resized using the properties menu revert to previous size after save
• [GLIFFY-3109] – Some Users of IE8 Windows 7 cannot get past loading screen

Improvement

• [GLIFFY-1409] – Usability Issue – Account Manager: User tab commits changes silently when moving to Folder Tab
• [GLIFFY-3033] – Have overlay display X and Y or Width and Height when shape is mutated
• [GLIFFY-3037] – Have Overlay HUD display Rotation

We’ve also released a new feature that is part of our larger ongoing diagram creation simplification project. This feature assists in allowing you to quickly connect one shape to another. When you have a specific type of shape added to the stage, activate the connector tool, then drag a connector line out of the shape from a connection point. When you release the mouse, a menu will appear allowing you to quickly select the next shape to connect to. You can continue to connect shapes in this fashion, allowing you to produce a presentable flowchart, sitemap, network, or UML diagram in just minutes. During this process, if you need to quickly exit text editing on a shape, just hit the Tab key. We are actively working on other features and enhancements that will further improve your experience and productivity in building diagrams with Gliffy.

Here is an example of using this new shape connection and selection feature:

Step 1 – Drop a shape and add text.

Step 2 – Select the connector tool, click connection point and drag right to create a line.

Step 3 – Release mouse and select a shape to connect to.

Step 4 – Add text.

For a complete list of features, improvements and bug fixes, see the list below:

Bug

• [GLIFFY-185] – Copying two groups together makes pasted objects One group
• [GLIFFY-209] – Undo a group with Lines, shapes and text causes issues
• [GLIFFY-332] – Copy and pasted group of shapes goes funky when contents of buffer are large and many
• [GLIFFY-1291] – Undo Removes Object, not Line as Last Action
• [GLIFFY-1292] – Reopen Diagram with Pasted Grouped Objects Causes Group to Merge
• [GLIFFY-1298] – When dropping shape on drag before complete animation expansion, it will drop small.
• [GLIFFY-2878] – Undo of Swimlanes Fails
• [GLIFFY-2880] – Using Undo with Drawing Guides, Breaks Undo
• [GLIFFY-2912] – Selecting left justification on text editor doesn't take effect
• [GLIFFY-2936] – Slightly rotated text does not show all text when loaded
• [GLIFFY-2947] – Drawing Guides overide Grouped shapes position after paste
• [GLIFFY-2966] – The straight line is getting disconnected from a shape when connected
• [GLIFFY-2977] – The red circle over connection point is remaining on stage
• [GLIFFY-3004] – Flash Error when Saving Horizontal Swimlane with Links

Improvement

• [GLIFFY-1865] – Set Number of Swimlane Lanes in Shape Properties to the Right of the Drawing Stage
• [GLIFFY-2876] – Usability: "Double-click to edit" text in swimlane shapes should disappear when double-clicked
• [GLIFFY-2917] – Line end points zooming out issue
• [GLIFFY-2929] – Cursor display issue while logging in anonymously
• [GLIFFY-2945] – Connection points should reduce so that they don't touch each other when the shape size is small
• [GLIFFY-2961] – Change in shape size not reflecting to size of red circles on connection points.
• [GLIFFY-2963] – Look into setting media load timeouts differently for Yahoo images and Account images.
• [GLIFFY-2969] – Issue with arrow of dimension line

Sub-task

• [GLIFFY-2837] – When finished drawing line connected to a shape, popup an in context menu to quickly select a connecting shape
• [GLIFFY-2996] – For single lane swimlanes, give option to create text in the lane, like with the multiple lane swimlanes

Know someone awesome who we should talk to? Refer us and you’ll get a $1000 referral bonus.

Learn more here:

http://www.gliffy.com/jobs/

Thx!

-chris

• 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!