Making the Creately Experience Better

What a glorious month its been… We received fantastic news just a couple of days ago that Creately (and Cinergix) have been named in the Top 50 Coolest Company awards by Anthill Magazine, then we moved into our brand spanking new offices in Sri Lanka and now we have a Creately release packed with features you’ve been asking for.

New Release Highlights

This week’s release is focused on making your experience with Creately a whole lot better. We’ve now made it possible to use your own local machine fonts in all diagrams, made significant performance improvements, fixed many UML bugs as well as introduced new templates for project managers and business users.

All the Fonts you can Eat

A few months ago, we added 10 open-source fonts to Creately to let you create professional looking diagrams. But guess what? Once our users tasted the forbidden fruit, everyone was clamoring for more. So as our legal team (read Founders) tried to figure out a way to get around the copyright issues of embedding fonts in Creately, the Dev team came up with a beautiful solution.

Why not let users load and use their local machine fonts in their diagrams! Hmm… sounds great but what happens when someone uses a font in a shared diagram that another user does not have installed on their computer? That’s where font notifications and substitution come in. We’ve devised a method of notifying users when there’s a missing font in a diagram and automatically providing a substitute font.

We think this is a excellent solution that will make many of you very happy! Try your hand at a diagram with fancy fonts and let us know what you think.

UI Performance Improvements

Unresponsive software sucks. Nobody wants to use software that freezes up or slows down. So here at Creately, we’ve kept a close eye on the performance of the application to make sure it exceeds your expectations. Lately though, as our customers have started working on very large and complex diagrams, some users have reported a degradation in UI performance. We decided we’ll have none of that and neither will our customers, so the team set about analyzing the issues and have made significant improvements to the codebase to improve the ‘feel’ of the User Interface. We’re not through yet, but are pleased with the improvements we’ve made this week.

Here’s a short list of what you can expect:

• Selecting Multiple Objects and Select All (Ctrl-A) is much faster making Copy-and-Paste much smoother.
• Significantly less lag when moving Container Objects or other objects into Containers.
• Faster cursor and mouse response as we’ve optimized all the redraws that happen when you move your mouse cursor over the drawing canvas.
• No more waiting to download fonts (which can be upto 2MB in size) cos we’ll automatically load the fonts installed on your computer.
• Watch this space, we’ll be doing more performance related improved over the coming weeks. Let us know, if there’s anything else troubling you.

Resizable Drawing Canvas – ‘Cos you asked for it

We’ve gone from a fixed canvas size, to a customizable size in the last 3 months. But you said that wasn’t enough – You wanted to be able to change the size of the Canvas as your diagram grew – making this the 2nd most requested feature on our Community Support Site.

So we’re gone and done it. Now you can click on the Page Properties tab (click on the Canvas, then open the Properties Tab on the right-side) to change the size of your diagram page anytime. Simple.

Better UML designs with Creately

We’ve had a renewed focus on the UML modeling and design space. We’ve found that our users love Creately for UML. This week, we revisited all our UML shapes and have fixed many little issues in the UML KObject shape sets for Class, Object, Collaboration and Deployment diagrams. More info on these UML fixes can be found in this blog post.

New Business Templates

We are always adding new Templates to Creately. This week, you’ll find new templates for Work Breakdown Structures, Ansoff Matrix, Value Stream Maps and more.

@charanjit