posted11/11/09
Everyone at Creately have been working really hard over the past couple of weeks adding brand new features and KObjects to the Creately library as well as updating the performance of the application.
Here at Creately, we feel people matter, and want to continue to keep our customers happy. We’ve had a few emails from our users reporting various issues like wonky Text Rotation in Flash Player version 9. We’ve tried our best to fix this problem, but unfortunately certain issues like this have their root cause in bugs inherent in the Flash Player, that we cannot do anything to fix.
So after careful thought, we’ve decided to raise the minimum required version of the Flash Player to run Creately from Flash Player 9 to Flash Player 10.
Besides fixing this bug, we want to take advantage of the new performance improvements in Flash Player 10 to deliver a better experience to our customers over the coming releases.
Other Active Script 3 enhancements available in Flash Player 10 also provide more efficient data structures and will let us deliver smarter and cooler features.
You can test the version of Flash Player you have installed and if you’re not using version 10, click here to upgrade now.
So we’ll leave you with this task as we go through the final stages of releasing our brand new Projects feature.
@charanjit
Image by: Mayuki/CC BY 2.0
posted02/11/09
The beginning of October saw the release of invites to the Google Wave preview. I signed up for the early developer sandbox access right back when Google Wave was first announced. I found the sandbox fine for development but not very useful for regular early adopters or businesses wanting to actually use it. In fact it might have been considered a bit of a fishing trip by Google to try and determine the quality use-cases for Google Wave. It seems that just providing what email might be like if it was launched today has not really been enough to capture the imagination of people. Ross Hill has written an interesting article on how Google Wave worked for him and his co-workers and what aspects of Google Wave make it appealing. However it is interesting to note that the use-cases he highlights could easily be achieved through other Internet tools already available (Etherpad springs to mind as well as regular threaded emails) which are simpler to understand. Life hacker have a whole heap of other use cases that you might like to check out.
I’m sure you all know by now that we are passionate/obsessed about supporting our users. We currently provide everyone with 24 hour support and reply to all your queries as quickly as possible. Even with this in place, we are always looking for new ways to reach out to our customers and answer your Creately questions and queries quicker. There is nothing more annoying than having to ask a question through a support system and then having to wait days for a reply only to not finish the task and having to go back to it later. This kind of thing can really reduce your task or project closures.
The customer support Google Wave use-case is a very strong draw for us and quite possibly the best use-case we have right now for Google Wave. The ability for a Wave to easily support images (in our case screenshots of your issue), multiple users (so we can help an entire team at once) and real-time collaboration (again to get you going quicker) makes it ideal for support.
Therefore starting immediately you can send us your support waves through Google Wave using our Wave address: creately@googlewave.com (note this won’t work through traditional email) - we will always try to be online but if we aren’t there just send the wave to us and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible. We realise that not many of you will have a Google Wave account right now, but if Wave proves as successful as Google hopes this won’t be the case for long. So when you get your Google Wave account please give us a go.
Finally, can you think of any other Google Wave use-cases for Creately? Perhaps you have an idea which will help you, us and all the other Creately users.
@nick_foster
Image taken from Google Wave API page.
posted23/07/09
Collaboration for All
We’re happy to deliver The No.1 most requested feature on Creately Community Support. Its been sitting on the top of the request list for some weeks now, but now we’re confident our systems are ready to ensure you and your team always have an excellent user experience on Creately.
Why it took this long?
Most users have been very excited to share Creately with friends, colleagues and classmates. We appreciate that, but at the same time, we wanted to make sure we can provide each and every one of you with the best possible Creately experience, both online and offline. We feel we are now ready to provide a much larger user-base with the type of Support, that we at Creately hold so dearly. So to open up Creately to more of you, we needed to put in the people and resources to ensure you and your team continue to enjoy working on Creately.
Go on, invite someone already!
From today, there’s no more waiting around for a Creately beta. If you’re invited, you’re in. So you can now invite your friends and team-mates who don’t have a beta invitation to use Creately. We’ve endeavored to make this process as simple as possible, so go on, invite a friend or two to share in the magic of Creately. They will receive an email with a link to register and can then immediately view your shared diagram.
3 Steps to Team Collaboration (or How to invite a team-mate to Creately)
Step 1
|
Step 2
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 Click to open the Share panel on the right of the Creately app |
 Enter email addresses you want to invite & hit Invite |
Step 3
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 Add a note to the collaborators and Send |
Go on, log on to Creately now and share a diagram.
@charanjit
posted13/05/09
Today we received some great coverage on the tech blog Read Write Web. This has generated some support emails and feedback from people who are excited to be trying Creately and have questions. I was just answering a question and I realized providing support gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside.
Here at Creately, we have discussed this a few times and we have always been of the opinion that superb Support is the only option we can provide to our users. Everyone who works on the support and feedback email has this view and it is what motivates us to answer peoples questions as soon as we receive them and go on to research and solve the problem.
We have set ourselves the goal of trying to resolve every user’s questions while he is still on his current Creately session. With this ambition in mind, we have started to look at the people, processes and software we use to engage with our customers - so we can deliver the best support experience available from an online software.
I would also just like to provide a little insight into the joy of support for me. I know in my heart that we have made and are continuing to create a fantastic diagramming application. We have often spoken about the problem that we are solving and discussed what our users would like to do. However when we have diagrams shared with us and we see them as attachments to support requests, it always brings a smile to my face to see how creatively people are using Creately.
Keep those suggestions, questions, ideas and diagrams coming 
@nick_foster
PS. Remember to visit our Community Support Site to share your ideas or vote for other users’ ideas.
