posted30/08/10
Today we are launching our new Creately Diagram Viewer. It’s a simple embeddable widget that allows you to include a zoom-able, sharable and always updated Creately diagram in any web page. To top it off, we’ve created a Google Gadget to allow the Creately Diagram Viewer to be used easily with iGoogle and for our Google Apps customers within your Google Sites.
Diagram Viewer Widget
The Creately Diagram Viewer is a HTML5 web widget that lets you easily embed an interactive Creately diagram viewer into any webpage. You can add the widget to your webpage by simply pasting the embed code from the properties panel inside Creately into your webpage source. You can add the widget to as many pages as you like and also add multiple widgets to the same webpage. Once added just save your webpage and your Creately diagram is available immediately.
Great Features
The Creately Diagram Viewer comes with some great features that will make creating and sharing diagrams with Creately a breeze. Try the live example below to see what we mean.
Mouseover to see the Viewer in action
You can change the dimensions of your widget so it fits perfectly into any webpage. The widget provides Zoom and Pan features that mean even the largest diagrams are still clear and easy to navigate. There’s now no need to scale your exported diagram image just to fit it to the webpage and in the process lose the detail in your diagrams. Simply set up the size of your widget and embed it into any webpage.
Always Update to Date
The widget always fetches the latest version of your diagram to display making sure that visitors always see the latest version. When working as a team on the same diagram or diagrams in a project all the changes made using Creately will be reflected immediately in your documentation ensuring that the Creately diagram and the published webpage stay in sync. This save time and reduces costs because you no longer need to upload or update the diagram images and reduces errors due to old knowledge being published.
We are big fans of Twitter and Facebook and we know a lot of our users are too. The Creately Diagram Viewer provides the tools for effortless sharing with built in Facebook and Twitter buttons. We all enjoy receiving praise and love for our work. When you embed your Creately diagrams in your site you can receive the qudos for your work you deserve.
Community Diagram Pages
To get a real world feel for the Creately Diagram Viewer please visit the Public Diagram Pages which are all now powered by the Creately Diagram Viewer. Note - Click on the diagram to go to the individual diagram page and see the Creately Diagram Viewer - try out the zoom, pan and sharing features as you browse the diagrams. On each diagram page don’t miss the right panel for the embed code. Finally remember if like any of the diagrams, show your love by sharing it via Twitter or Facebook with 1-click!
Google Gadget For Apps and iGoogle
Creately is loved by thousands of Google Apps users. With Creately we’ve been working hard to bring better diagram and collaboration to Google Apps. So this week Google Sites finally gets what it was missing - built-in diagrams that work just like the wiki does.
The brand new Creately Diagram Gadget for Google Sites and iGoogle makes it easy to embed the Creately Diagram Viewer into the Google Platform. This way, anyone who edits your Google Apps Site can also easily access and update the Creately diagram from right within the site.
For those who are impatient to get going just use this URL for the Creately Diagram Gadget: http://creately.com/player/gadget/createlyplayer.xml
Just like the Creately Diagram Viewer, the Gadget’s diagram is always up to date and brings with it the benefits of collaborative working.
No More Squinting
The Creately Diagram Gadget allows you to embed multiple diagrams from Creately in to a single Sites page along with explanatory text. You can create really big diagrams, and still embed them on Site pages without having to scale them down. Just alter the display dimensions of the Creately Diagram Gadget and click to embed. Your Google Site page now remains neat and intact with all your Creately diagrams appearing within the Creately Diagram Viewer allowing your full control of your Sites appearance.
The Creately Diagram Gadget for iGoogle provides all the same features as the Google Sites gadget plus it allows you to embed your Creately diagram anywhere that accepts a Google Gadget.
You can learn how to embed this gadget on Google Site by visiting our Creately Diagram Gadget instructions page. Or check out the Creately Diagram Gadget on the Google Gadget listing page - and don’t forget to leave us a review. Thanks!
@Creately Team
posted18/08/10
We’re extremely delighted to be nominated for Asia’s Top 50 Apps poll! And, now we need your votes to be selected as Asia’s Best App! We’ve got 2 more weeks left, so vote for Creately NOW!
There’s no registration required, simply select Creately and punch in your email address (optional), and you’re done! Its a pretty long list of apps, so if you have any trouble do a Ctrl-F to search for Creately in the list. We need all your love and support!
With your help, we hope to make it through to the Asia’s largest Innovation Conference, Accelarate 2010. Vote for Creately here; and tell your friends and colleagues to vote for Creately too!
Voting closes on 31st August! Give us your votes now!
posted11/08/10
It’s been less than a month since our release, and we’re back with yet another exciting upgrade to Creately! The team has been hard at work putting together some great ideas to make Creately even easier to use, so we hope you like whats in store.
New Look Side Panel
We’ve got a new look on the side panel. Our UI was beginning to look a lil dated - so we’ve started work on a refresh. This week we’ve got a brand new look for our super duper Side Panel (where all the mojo’s at). Like what you see? Let us know.
Notes Panel
More interestingly, we’ve added a new Notes panel to make it easier to collaborate and communicate clearly in your teams. Those inline comments are great, but wouldn’t it be better if you could explain your diagrams and mockups by adding some notes to help the reader along.
Check out the new Notes button on the Side Panel - its not a heavy-weight text editor but you do get a Rich Text Editor to help you get your ideas into Creately.
Good News for Mac Users!
You Mac fanboys out there have something to really cheer about. We’ve fixed the horizontal scroll issues with Apple’s Magic Trackpad. Now you can use 2 fingers to scroll both vertically and horizontally in the Creately application. Try it out now!
Improved Smart KObjects
We saw the trouble you had in creating tables, tabs and accordion panes in your Web Mockups! Haven’t you always wished you could easily build a table in Creately or just change the number of tabs displayed in the Tab objects? Now you can.
The team’s been hard at work all winter (yes, we come from a land down-under), putting the final touches to a brand new Smart KObject framework to bring a new level of ease of use and flexibility to your Creately diagrams. This week we announce 3 new Smart KObjects - and many more will follow in the coming weeks.
Professional Dynamic Tables
We heard you say how difficult it was to add Tables in your Mockups, so we’ve added dynamic Tables to our KObject library. Now you can simply enter Text and the Table will resize itself. Simply drag-n-drop a Table from the left panel, and start to edit the Table properties to add Table Data. To create a new column, simply type a ‘,’ (comma) and for a new row, enter in a new row of data. This way, you get easy to use dynamic Tables for all your mockups and diagrams.
Multiple Tab Pages in seconds
You can now create multiple Tab Pages on a Tab Control quickly. We know how aggravating it is to insert a number of individual Tabs to create Tab pages. But, with the smart KObject improvements you can create as many Tabs as you might inside the Tab Control by simply editing the Tab Bar text. To add tabs, simply type ‘,’ (comma) and the Tab title, so “Tab1, Tab2, Tab3″ will create 3 Tabs in this order. Adding a ‘*’ to any Tab title marks it as the selected Tab.
Collapsible Accordion Pane
Lastly for this week we looked at our Accordion Pane and decided it too could do with a makeover! Now you can configure your Accordion pane with just a few simple keystrokes. For example, the following Text will create 4 panes with the second one open and the rest collapsed:
These are just the initial few smart KObjects we’ve created. Expect a whole lot more smart KObjects in the weeks to come… Diagramming has never been easier!
Login to Creately now to check out the great new features, and let us know what you feel. We’d love to hear it from you!
With Love
Creately Team
posted16/06/10
Last week the Flash Player team at Adobe released version 10.1. While its a small dot version number change, it is a monumental release in terms of its content and significance to what is happening in the browser market today.
Faster Creately
We’re very excited about the new version. With Flash 10.1, Creately now runs blazingly fast on the Mac (and on PC’s), is overall delivers a more stable and reliable experience. Adobe has thankfully fixed a number of issues that have plagued our loyal customers since the last version, including issues with image uploading on the Mac.
To achieve this performance improvements, Flash 10.1 supports hardware acceleration of 2D and 3D graphics, manages memory more efficiently especially in tabbed browsing situations and includes a number of core improvements to the run-time to reduce execution time.
Another very exciting new feature for us at Creately is Flash Player’s new Multi-Touch support API’s. The team can’t wait to have a go at this in the near future!
The Future of Flash
This release of the Flash Player comes at a time when there has been much hostility against Flash. In light of the the Apple vs. Adobe debate, we feel this release put Adobe in a good place to start answering its critics. We hope they will continue aggressively improving its product capabilities rather than investing in meaningless ad campaigns in an attempt to reclaim Flash’s position as a powerful cross-browser platform.
Of course, the elephant in the room when discussing Flash is HTML5. For us as application developers, the competition between the technologies is great news. And no, they won’t kill each other off, it’s complimentary.
Historically, Flash has enabled us to push the envelope on what’s been possible in the browser well before the browser delivered. Now thankfully, with the focus on HTML5 and the browser wars of the 21st century back in full force, we are loving the amount of standards adoptions, evolution, and aggressive development that is helping the browser itself become a very powerful run-time to build on.
For Creately this means there are more things we’ll be able to do, to deliver awesome user experiences to our customers. It does not matter whether it’s delivered in Flash or HTML - the user only care that the experience is seamless, secure and productive.
We believe many companies including Adobe, Google, Mozilla, Microsoft (yes) get this. Only a few geeks care whats under the hood. End users only care that their job gets done. I’m surprised our friends at Cupertino who build ‘magical’ devices don’t get it. 
posted12/06/10
Today, we’re happy to announce the release of Creately for FogBugz, a brand new plugin for everyone’s favourite software project management and bug-tracking system, FogBugz from FogCreek Software.
Creately for FogBugz lets everyone on your project team communicate clearly by easily creating and including diagrams in FogBugz. With full integration into the FogBugz interface, you can easily add Use Cases, Wireframes, Flowcharts, UML or any other diagrams to FogBugz cases and wiki pages.
Squash’Em Bugs
Bugs fixing will go a lot smoother when you can clearly explain the issues to developers. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, so get everyone on the same page by adding annotated wireframes, or updated Use Cases to every FogBugz case. Anyone working on the case can edit and and modify diagrams as the case or feature is worked on.
Up-to-date Documentation
The ability to quickly add diagrams directly within Wiki pages will make documenting your software projects a lot less of a chore. No more attaching external Visio files, and no more expensive desktop-based software. With Creately for FogBugz, the whole team can update project documentation right within the browser, saving time and more importantly helping keep your specifications up-to-date.
Get it now!
Creately for FogBugz plugin is available for installation on your own Fogbugz server starting from $85/user with bulk discounts available for larger teams. Currently we only support Fogbugz on the Windows platform, but a Linux and hosted version for FogBugz OnDemand will be announced shortly.
Download Free 14-day trial
Installation Help
Give yourself the advantage of Creately for Fogbugz by purchasing your license right now or if your not quite ready you can also download the free 14-day trial.
