Online, Real time, Multi user collaboration flowchart software.
We tried to update to the latest version of Flowchart yesterday with updated UI elements and it took longer than expected and the new UI elements were confusing a lot of you so we decided to put the old version back and incrementally update Flowchart.com to the latest UI so it will be less confusing. In the next coming weeks you will see more frequent updates.
The latest push 7270 of Flowchart.com has the following updates:
- Record/Playback charts: Now when you record a chart session, You will also be recording the chat session for later playback.
- Text color in PDF/PNG : Text color issues are fixed when you save your chart in, PDF/PNG formats.
- Text wrapping now knows the boundary of the page.
- Few collaboration bugs.
What’s new in the latest push 7218?
- Now flowchart supports all languages and localizations. We can expand the UI to support different languages. International fonts rendering, rotating, expanding works fully now.
- Added Clipart features : For flowchart-symbols added ability to manipulate them like simple objects. You can change colors, line styles etc.
- Record/Playback is much more smoother.
Feed back most welcome.
Many people have sent email asking why we’re calling Flowchart.com a “web 3.0″ Software service?
The evolution of the web has been happening in stages, as technologies mature, so are the offerings people create. When we first conceptualized online flowchart system we planned to build a eco-system along with it. An eco-system that was product centric. There wasn’t any to be found.
Web 2.0 buzz was taking shape then(2006) What we saw was people building excellent technologies that have API’s to mash up with other technologies, but not really enhancing their application features, it was still like the old Boxed software days where users request are queued and when/if the developer liked or found the time to add it, they did. We needed to go a step above.
Flowchart.com has a built in Marketplace where designers/developers can use the API and build tools, scripts, objects which they can either sell to other users or share it for free. This produce specific eco-system where users can enhance the application and can profit from it is our reason to call ourselves Web 3.0 software service. Irving Wladawsky-Berger Blog post has a great phrase by Nigel Coats that suits Web 3.0 very well and it is how Flowchart.com is built - framework in which events happen
We noticed when you embed a chart it wasn’t fully loading yesterday. We found the issue to be a mod rewrite bug that was fixed today.
We’ve pushed the build 7085 to the live site. The following features were enhanced.
1) Center of rotation for objects now stick to last know position.
2) script and object optimization on safari browser.
Over the weekend we had couple of servers fail and the extra load on other servers brought the system to a crawl so you might have seen sever error randomly. Every issue is fixed now.
We’ve gotten reports that charts are not being saved after user clicks on the “Save” icon. We investigated this issue and found out that IE 6(Internet Explorer) is the culprit. Apparently if you have 30-40 objects on a single page IE refuses to fire off Save Events. Our lE expert found a work around and fixed it. The patch will be updated to the site tomorrow.
Welcome everyone!
This is the first post on the blog. Here is what we’re trying to accomplish:
1) Update you on the Flowchart.com daily fixes/additions.
2) Discuss issues that are brought up by you and the development team.
3) Industry outlook
We are Flowchart.com : Online, Real time, Multiuser collaboration flowchart software.
People behind flowchart.com are:Jeff Bhavnanie and Sahar Sarid (Conceptualist.com). Flowchart.com is our vision. Flowchart.com idea came about as most inventions do, Frustration! We were dealing with attorneys on a patent process and sending ideas back and forth was not only time consuming, it was also frustrating, as not all parties were together collaborating. Sending documents back and forth via email led to one of the parties missing a couple of emails and that skewed the time tangent. Since it wasn’t the only idea we were collaborating on, the domino effect of wasted time increased exponentially. So being our Idea man, Sahar said, why can’t we collaborate in real time and explain our ideas graphically so everyone is on the same page always? Hmmm…
After investigating we didn’t see any product that matched what we wanted. I discussed this with our dev team and it sparked a challenge for them. All Developers love a challenge. Our team just came off developing Niche Directory Platform (Funeralhomes.com) and were looking for something completely different and challenging to do. Semenov, Dev manager is a man of many talents and he was excited about this idea along with Team lead, Azizi who accepted the challenge and spent time doing some R&D, Once they got back with a positive notion that it was going to be possible to achieve our initial goals, we all agreed to go ahead.
We dove into development of v1 and 4 months later we had a prototype we could play with. Sahar played with the first prototype and was pleased with the fact that we came so far so quick and said let’s go 100%, I agreed! 3 months later we had v1.0 of Flowchart.com. Flowchart.com was workable product but we knew we could do lots more, but we figured, let the market decide and released v1.0 and in 2 months we had over 20K beta testers giving us feedback about how Flowchart.com can and should be improved. We listened and learned. We then decided v1.0 needed an overhaul, with a clean slate, we went back to create v2.0 Our goal was to make Flowchart.com 2.0 be scalable and expandable. So after 8 (1 to plan 5 to develop , 2 for internal Alpha testing) months we have v2.0! and we’re not done developing features into the current system. We iterate almost on a daily basis.
Flowchart.com is currently v2.0 Beta. We need your feedback to improve and make it the most useful Flowcharting tool.
