Creately Blog

Better Diagram Manager and More

3) Pretty shapes and connectors!

All your abstract shapes come with a default fill! We’ve decided to lose the plain boring white fills in our abstract shapes, and now they’re all with pretty gradient fills. We’ve not stopped with there, we’ve also tuned the Flowchart object connection points for beautiful looking flowcharts; and created thinner outlines on all the User Interface objects to give it a more uniform look.

We’ve introduced a faster JPEG encoder to make exporting JPEG significantly faster, along with better error management and recovery on Network and Session issues all to keep our valuable users happy!

Local Diagram Backup and New Bulk Pricing

Today, we’re excited to announce Creately’s improved Import/Export capability made possible with our new Creately Document Markup Language (.cdml) and brand new Team Plans with great discounts for larger Teams. Lets jump straight into it.

Save your Diagrams Locally

First off, the new Import/Export capability. Team and Pro users can now backup all your Creately diagrams locally on your desktop by simply exporting a Creately Document Markup Language format file (*.cdml). These exported files can easily be imported back into Creately maintaining all embedded images and links at full-resolution.

We’ve significantly upgraded our upload and download infrastructure, so now you’ll be able to download CDML, PDF, PNG and JPEGs as well as import your own graphics into Creately at a blistering speed. This is great for all those mockups and presentations that need custom graphics. We know you’ll love this.

We’re most excited about the possibilities the new CDML format will present for our users and developers, so over the next few weeks , Hiraash will be putting up some ideas and examples of what you can do with our new diagram document format. Go ahead, export an image and open the CDML file with any text editor for a sneak peek.

Bulk User Plans!

After we announced our Team plans and Creately for Google Apps, we’ve been inunadated with requests from larger Teams looking to adopt Creately in their pursuit for more efficient project collaboration. We’ve heard you and we’re happy to announce fantastic bulk discounts for larger Teams.

With the new prices, you’ll pay $8/month each for the first 5 users. If you have a larger team of say 12 users, you’ll simply pay $8 for the first 5 users, then $6 for the next 5 and finally $5 for the last 2 users. So a 12 user team will be charged $80 / month ($40 + $30 + $10). That’s a 17% savings, straight off the bat.

Check out our plans page for more details. If you need more than a 100 users on Creately - call us we’re here to help.

These new discounts will make adopting Creately across your Google Apps domain excellent value for money. As always, we’ve got great discounts for Educators, Colleges and do-gooders - just reach out to us.

What to Expect

Over the coming weeks - expect some exciting new announcements that will Creately the best visual collaboration and diagramming application for software, design and support teams, including a new plugin for FogBugz and improvements in our software diagramming capability. Until then happy diagramming.

@Creately Team

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

Easy UML diagrams with Creately

We’ve had support for UML designs and diagrams for a while here at Creately. And we’ve found that many of our users really like collaborating on UML designs with their Teams through Creately. With built-in commenting, easy embeds for your project wiki and PDF exports, Creately is perfectly suited for almost all types of software and design documentation.

Little Niggly Issues

Unfortunately, there were a few issues and limitations with our UML support. Little niggly things that were marring your experience with Creately. So we’re spent the last forth-night going through all the reported issues with a fine tooth comb to make Creately for UML an easy to use and perfectly functional UML modelling software. This is just the beginning. Expect a whole lot more from Creately for UML in the coming weeks.

What have we Improved?

Without going into too much detail, I’ll list out some of the fixes we’re included in this release of Creately UML.

1. Resizing UML shapes - Previously, when you resize a UML shape like a Class or Package, the new size is not correctly saved, resulting in diagrams getting a little messy when they are re-opened later. This fix was particularly challenging for UML objects, as they support Filtering data properties in the diagram - making them dynamic shapes that resized as you added more Attributes and Members. Issue Fixed.
2. Copy & Pasting a UML shape resulted in the copied shape being resized to its default size. This has been fixed, so the next time you make a copy of any UML object, you’ll get an exact copy. Issue Fixed.
3. Limit on the size of the Attributes and Operations you can enter into a Class and Object Shape. We’ve removed this now, so you can model large classes with no problems. Issue Fixed.
4. Adding more attributes and operations to UML shapes, didn’t always automatically resize the shapes, resulting in a muddled image. Now all UML objects will automatically resize to fit all visible data properties. Issue Fixed.

   

5. When working with Filters on UML shapes, turning on the attributes or properties in a small shape would cause the text to spill out of the shape. Now all shapes automatically re-size to accommodate filtered text. Issue Fixed.

We’re working very hard to make Creately an ideal solution for all you software and design teams out there. So watch this space as we introduce new features and fixes that will make your team’s life a whole lot easier when it comes to working on UML designs, Mockups, Wireframes and Sitemaps.

@charanjit

Preview: Creately with Projects!

Its been a month since our last major release and we’re very happy to announce that a brand spanking new Creately will be out next week with some of those features who’ve been asking for.

We’ve also introduced a new pricing plan; don’t want to say too much about it here, but look forward for the next blog post to learn about our easy pricing plans that will fit your needs just right.

Shareable Projects with Tags - Cos You Asked for It!

Next week, Creately will be launching a brand new feature - Shareable Projects with Tags - to make it even easier for software dev teams, designers and consulting teams to create and better organize their visual artifacts and designs. We have got a new layout for managing all your diagrams in Shareable Projects. This layout is more user friendly and together with user-defined tags will make Creately easier to use for all the project teams out there that live by Creately. Now it’s so easy to invite your whole team and clients to collaborate on projects and have everything organized with tags.

Also, the new ‘Create a New Document’ dialog now comes with a segment to assign useful tags and descriptions to your project documents.

New KObject Shapes

We’ve added plenty more shapes and now offer over 800 free shapes to draw just about anything you need, including these brand-new professionally designed shapes for Value Stream Mapping, Chemistry Lab Equipment, People Silhouettes, UML, Wireframes and more.

1) Value Stream Mapping Shapes

2) Chemistry Lab Equipment

3) People Silhouettes

Great looking people shapes that will give your diagram a real nice professional finish.

Making it Easier to Try Creately

Finally, we want everyone to be able to give Creately a try, and so it will now be accessible to all new users without having to sign up first. So tell all your friends to check it out.

That’s all for now, but watch out for our newsletter in your mailbox when Creately launches early next week.

@charanjit