Creately is an easy to use Online Diagramming software - purpose built for team collaboration. Powerful features and an intuitive interface make Creately ideal for teams working together on everything from Business Diagrams, Strategy Maps, Flowcharts, Web Mockups to UML designs.
Here we share our experiences and lessons learnt building a web-company.
Thank you to everyone who voted. We have made it through to the top 10 applications in the of Best RIA of 2009 competition. It is a great feeling. You can see the full results on the Insideria website.
The voting for the top 3 starts now til 6th September and we need your help again to get us to the top.
Here’s the link - Just click to vote - http://oreillynet.com/insideria/polls/237.csp
We’re really happy and honoured to be nominated for the best Rich Internet Applications of 2009 over at O’Reilly media’s InsideRIA.com site. It’s come as a real surprise and we’re definitely very excited to be honoured amongst some of our favourite RIAs on the web.
There will be 2 rounds of Voting - the first round of online polling is going on now and we’d love for you to click here to vote for Creately. There’s no registration or signup required. Just click and Vote. We hope to be able to make it through to the final round with your support.
The Finals will be held Live at Adobe’s Max 2009 event in LA in October 2009. We’d love to be there - so vote for us and we’ll see you at Max.
History
URL shortening has been around for ages. For example tinyurl.com has been around since 2002, which while not that long is ages on Internet. With the recent popularity of Twitter and its artificial limit of 140 characters for the tweets has really moved URL shortening from a specialty to a mainstream activity with a very useful purpose.
Traditionally URL shortening services have generated a random and unique code which is placed after their own short domain name to create the short URL. Recently they have started to allow users to add their own unique code although this is a little used feature because of the need to maintain a short URL. Take a look at bit.ly to see this in action.
Advantages & Disadvantages
URL shortening has its distinct advantages and disadvantages. For the Internet user, URL shortening provides a mechanism to easily include short yet useful links in a message without using up all the available characters. For the website provider URL shortening can remove or even damage their beautifully laid SEO plans. It removes the easily readable and meaningful URLs that make search better and help users understand what they are going to be viewing.
So we have two forces here pulling in different directions. Well this got me thinking about what we should be providing at Creately to really enable our users to publish their diagrams for the public to view in a manner that makes sense and allows the most flexibility.
Our Solution
It should be stated at this point that basic URL shortening is not technically difficult, a point proven by the explosion of URL shortening services that have sprung up. You can do basic URL shortening - which is really URL redirection using the HTTP header - in about 10 lines of code in PHP (I’m sure it can be done in less if your really smart :-))
After much internal discussion we’ve decided to keep our new short URL service short and sweet with a new short domain
See are some sample URLs we’ve published from Creately:
Our URL shortening has been achieved with a mixture of Apache configuration changes and PHP code to enable the URL shortening. The flexibility and function that this provides to our users is huge. Any Creately user can now simply copy and paste this link into their email, IM, or Twitter post to share their diagram or design with the world at large.
In the future we have plans to allow Creately users to specify their own custom URL for published diagrams. This means that each diagram can have an SEO friendly link and it lets the links to be more descriptive.
If you have any ideas for improvements to our published diagram service please head over to our Community Support Site or email support@creately.com
If you have been following us, you’d know by now that we focus a lot on being ‘easy’. And if you’ve tried Creately, seen the video or gone through our list of features, you’ll know Creately is a feature-rich application. We have powerful features that are ahead of most other products in our market.
And yet, we only speak of easy. Not of our endless list of features. Why? because we believe all those features exist for the sole purpose of making the process of diagramming & design ‘easy’.
Easy does not stop at building an intuitive UI. It becomes ‘easy’ is when you consider what the user is trying to do and your application makes it easier for that goal to be achieved.
Lets take an example. Nick wants to redesign his office computer network. So he needs to
So when we mean easy, we look at the whole process.
Here, the diagram is the central artifact. A diagram is drawn in steps 1 and 2. So we focus on making drawing network diagrams easy. Large number of nodes, typically belong in groups. So collapsible groups - Check.
Also the diagram is about a real situation. A situation rich with data and information that needs to be referred to over and over again. So objects need to have attached data like IP addresses etc. Check.
Involves a team, so collaboration is a must. Check.
Maintaining it over a period of time means frequent updates. Multiple revisions - Check.
Overall, small mistakes in planning cost a lot in hardware. So some simple validation to tell you when you run out of ports on your switches help in the planning stages. - Check.
That’s just a snapshot of how we think about a specific use case. We start at drawing and from there we visit each step and evaluate how we can make that visually driven task easier and more intuitive.
With our KObject technology and a contextual UI, we are able to do this for many types of diagrams in different disciplines.
So now that we are nearing the public release of Creately, are we done? Not at all.
We’ll keep going up the use case ladder to higher order user goals that are centered around diagrams and visuals. And we will find ways to make things easy. That may mean complex functionality that shows only when its required, new KObjects or just a small amendment like a tooltip.
If we’ve learned one thing with Creately, is that ‘easy’ is not easy to do. But when you get it, it wins you die-hard fans. Fingers crossed!
PS - Have any suggestions on how we can use KObject technology to help the work you do in your field easier? Write to us or suggestion it on our Community Support Site.
With the recent release of the new Pink Panther movie here in Australia we’ve started using code names for each of our Creately releases. It’s pure coincidence that we named this first release on the greatest cartoon panther ever!
The next version of Creately isn’t going to be pink but it is going to be just as great.
Here at the Creately R&D Labs we’ve been hard at work adding a range of new features to the Creately framework and improving the current KObject sets. Its taken a lot of hard work but the release is now being finalised and will be ready in the coming week.
We’re a Customer-Driven startup, and are committed to letting our users guide us in developing a better product. We’re so exciting about this release because for the first time we got to introduce features that real users have asked for. Thank you for all the feedback, star ratings and suggestions you’ve given us.
‘Nuff said - Here’s what’s headed your way this week.
This is just a quick teaser. We’ll give you a full run down when we release the next instalment of Creately this week. We’d love to hear your thoughts so swing by our Community Support Site to request a feature or provide us with your ideas.
Image courtesy: www.maquilon.com
