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.

We’ll post more about what happened shortly, but in case you’re wondering, we did have a significant downtime event this morning which is now resolved. More soon….

UPDATE:
Here’s a rundown of what happened and how we plan to prevent this issue in the future. We’ve been growing pretty quickly, and unbeknownst to us we hit an upper limit in our database that started causing all sorts of problems. Unfortunately, this led to a situation where no additional diagram data could be saved. Even worse, when we attempted to alter the database structure to remove the upper limit that was causing us problems, we inadvertently corrupted the database. In our rush to get things up and running again, we also managed to pull a rookie move by not backing up the database before we performed the alternations. Umm, yeah, nice one, eh? Honestly, backing up might not have helped since the data become corrupted once we started hitting those upper limits, but either way we should have done it anyways. So…. if you’re still reading, that means we lost all data since our last complete backup which was performed around 11PM PST last night. Egad, not good.

We know your data is critical, and the fact that we lost a chunk of it is definitely not cool. In the short term, we want to make it right, so if you were affected by the recent downtime, shoot us an email to support@gliffy.com, and we’ll give you 3 months of free access to our new Premium Gliffy Online service. If you’re already a paying subscriber (thanks!) we’ll tack on an extra three months to your current paid period. This offer is good until Monday March 26th.

Now, the silver lining: Some of you likely noticed that we quietly launched our Premium Gliffy Online service just a few days ago. We are VERY grateful to those of you who have signed up for a subscription. Thanks to your contributions, we’ll be able to begin some upgrades to the service which will enhance reliability and help ensure that the sort of issues we had today will become a distant bad memory. We’re still putting together an action plan, but overall you should be aware that our next release will be light on features, and focused on improving overall application quality and reliability.

We are VERY sorry for the inconvenience this has caused, and all that we can ask is that you hang in there as we work out the kinks and create a highly reliable service.

thanks

Chris & Clint

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 Online Premium Now Available - Sign up before March 30th and save!
• Gliffy Online has a new symbol library for Entity-Relationship diagrams
• Gliffy Online has a new look
• Clint’s Drawing Tip o’ the month: Linking to other public diagrams and the off-page connector symbol
• Gliffy Plugin for Confluence
• Gliffy in action: Some of our favorite diagrams
• Green and Good stuff: Terra Pass

Gliffy Online Premium Now Available

After 10 months of collecting feedback, fixing bugs, and adding improvements to Gliffy Online, we’ve removed the ‘beta’ sticker and now have Basic and Premium versions:

Gliffy Online Basic:
- Free
- Create up to 3 private diagrams, and unlimited public diagrams
- 2MB Image upload limit

Gliffy Online Premium:
- 1 Year plan: Sign up before March 30th and get 1 year for $20 ($30 regular price)
- 2 Year plan: Sign up before March 30th and get 2 years for $35 ($45 regular price)
- Unlimited private diagrams
- Ad and nag free

See that discount before March 30th? That’s our way of saying THANK YOU to all our existing users for helping us make Gliffy Online what it is today. To take advantage of this discount, simply log into Gliffy Online and click one of the upgrade banners.

Gliffy Online has a new symbol library: ERD (entity-relationship diagram)

Once again, you’ve asked for a feature, and we deliver. This time we’ve added the Entity-Relationship symbol library.   No, these symbols are not meant to help you work out your differences with spirits from another world. These symbols are representative of the notation which is used for creating data models. If this doesn’t get you excited, you’re probably not a computer nerd like us, and I suggest just searching for ‘puppies’ in the image search…. that’s a lot more fun.

Gliffy Online has a new look
If you haven’t already bounced on over to Gliffy Online to take advantage of the discount, here’s another reason to take a peek. Gliffy Online now has a new look. We’ve removed a lot of the extra ‘chrome’ to enlarge the drawing area and make it easier for you to get work done. Love it? Hate it? Let us know by emailing us: support (at)gliffy (dot) com. Either way, check it out:

Clint’s Drawing Tip o’ the month:  Using the Off-Page Connector and Linking in public diagrams

That flowchart you made in Gliffy Online is getting too big. Plus, you want to give an nice flowing presentation of it to your boss so you can get that shiny new [Bugatti Veyron|http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/uploads/bugatti-veyron-big.jpg] as a bonus.  This is where embedding links in the off-page connector flowchart symbol and public diagrams comes in. In your flowchart, instead of including the sub flows in the main flow, create a new diagram for each sub flow, and use an off-page connector symbol (in the flowchart symbol library) to show the link to the sub flow, just use text for now.  Now, go ahead and publish each diagram, recording the public URL’s to each sub flow diagram.  Finally, in the main flow diagram, for each off-page connector, add text that is a link to that sub flow diagram.  You now have a way of easily presenting a large process flow, with clickable links to each sub flow.  You can also create links in the sub flow back to the main flow or other sub flows. 

Check out an example here

Gliffy Plugin for Confluence
See! Exciting diagrams in your favorite Enterprise Wiki, Confluence:

’nuff said

Gliffy in action: Some of our favorite diagrams

Is one of these yours?

One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six

Green and Good stuff: Terra Pass

There’s been a lot of talk about global warming these days. Given that many people own cars, fly in planes, and use electricity which are all contributers to global warming, it’s hard to know what to do. Certainly driving and flying less, and also reducing your electricity use is one way to help reduce your personal impact, but now there is another way. TerraPass helps you reduce your carbon footprint to zero. From the web site:

“When you buy a TerraPass, your money funds renewable energy projects such as wind farms. These projects result in verified reductions in greenhouse gas pollution. And these reductions counterbalance your own emissions.”

Consider purchasing a terra pass today.

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

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

I was interviewed by Network World this week, and I thought the quote that came out of that was pretty funny:

“We have two guys who were able to build this entire thing using just Laszlo and their brains, and now we have a profitable company in a matter of two years.”

The two guys being me and Clint. So…. I figure we’ll just use our zombie ways to find more brains and make more products…

Oh, and the profitability part is pretty cool, too.

It’s been a great experience working with the folks at Atlassian creating the Gliffy Plugin for Confluence. After working with this great bunch of folks, it’s clear why they have been so incredibly successful: They really go the extra mile.

I’ve worked quite a bit with Jonathan Nolen, the Director of Developer Relations at Atlassian, and he’s been instrumental in getting the plugin off the ground. Jonathan helped us solve a lot of the challenges we faced converting Gliffy into a Plugin, and even helped by making The Gliffy Plugin for Confluence page in the Confluence Extensions area a 1000% better. Thanks Jonathan!

Good Links:
* A great write-up about the Gliffy Plugin for Confluence on the Confluence developer blog
* The Gliffy Plugin for Confluence page in the Confluence Extensions area

My good friend and business partner Clint got engaged to his wonderful girlfriend Renais over the weekend. Aren’t they cute?

About a month ago I mentioned that we had been working on a few new surprises. I know, I know, you’ve been waiting in eager anticipation and wonder…. what could it be? Will Gliffy change their name because a few folks out there think it’s silly? Will Chris and Clint finally resolve their differences with a Gliffy quick draw battle?

If you’ve read the subject of this blog post, you’ve already figured out the previous rumors are not true… instead, surprise #1 is that we’ve released the UML symbol library. Clint has been working really really hard making some major infrastructure changes to Gliffy so that more complex symbols for UML diagrams would be possible. While I was busy playing with my new XBox 360… errr, I mean working on surprise #2, Clint has expanded the capabilities of Gliffy quite a bit.

For the geeks out there, here’s a little more interesting info about how Gliffy symbols work:
Gliffy renders symbols on both the Client application (built with OpenLaszlo, deployed via the Flash player) AND on the server side so that diagrams may be published as images or exported. In an effort to be standards compliant and ensure that we weren’t writing rendering code on the client and server, we decided to rely on SVG as a standard format for our symbols. The advantage of using SVG is that it’s vector based, and many popular image editors such as Illustrator are able to export it.

For our newer symbol libraries like UML, you can actually see the SVG that both the client and server use at runtime to render symbols. (you might need to view source)

We’re hoping that by using SVG as a standard, it will be easy for people to create their own symbol libraries in the future.

Anyway, I hope that little tid-bit was interesting. Time to get back to the 360…. err… I mean Surprise #2!

It’s been exactly 1 year since we came up with the idea to build Gliffy, and now we’re ready to show it to the world. With this release we now have several symbol libraries:

- Flowchart symbols for Flow Process Diagrams,/a>
- UI wireframe symbols for User Interface Designs
- Floor plan symbols for Floor Plan Diagrams
- Network shapes for Network Diagrams
- Basic shapes for Any Diagram

The publish feature of Gliffy allows you to embed drawings in web pages, wikis, or blogs posts. Here’s an example (click to enlarge):

We’ve been working really hard on Gliffy, but we know there is much more to be done. Your feedback so far has been invaluable, and we would love to hear more. Send any feature or support requests to support(at)gliffy(dot)com.

Thanks!

Hope everyone out there is having a great New Years so far. My name is Clint Dickson,
and I’m the Engineering Director for Gliffy, Inc. We’ve been really busy here getting
the next Beta release of Gliffy ready as well as taking care of our needs to continue
bootstrapping this project. All of you that have signed up for our Beta on our website
will be receiving an email in the not too distant future, giving you access to the
Gliffy Online Diagram Editor. We’re really excited about some of the great features we
have so far, such as collaboration and the ability to publish your ‘living’ diagrams to a
webpage or blog. Some other features to help give your diagrams flair include rich text
capabilities, drop shadows and gradients. See the screenshot below (click to see full-size image).

The cool thing is that this isn’t coming from me, who would obviously benefit from such a move, but from a recent San Jose Mercury News article that attempts to make some bold predictions for 2006.

The office moves to the Web. Documents, e-mail and spreadsheets move off your desktop computer to the Web.