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.
Its been a fantastic first 2 weeks for us here at Creately. Thank you to everyone who came to visit, sign up or subscribe to our “Name Your Own Price” plan. We’ve been so happy with how well our “Name Your Own Price” plan has worked that we’ve decided to continue our pricing experiment for a while longer. More info on this and our findings coming in the next blog post. In the meantime, enjoy our Creately updates for September.
Creately enhancements for the September
As promised, Creately is always improving, and this week we have a host of new capabilities and bug fixes that will deliver a better online diagramming experience.
1) Diagram Type Search
Some of you have mentioned that you had trouble finding the right templates in Creately, and as we add more templates, this will only get harder. So we decided the best thing to do is to let you search for the type of templates you need by tags and keywords. Less confusion, more usable- the Creately way.
2) Adding Text to Connectors
We’re added a new feature that will now make it even easier to label your connectors and relationships. You’ve asked for automatic labels on Use Case diagrams for <<extends>> and <<includes>>, so here it is. Tell us where else you’d like to see these automatic connector labels, we’ll be happy to add them on.
3) Transparent Fill on Objects
Another popular request from our support inbox. Now you can set the color of you objects to be transparent (i.e. No Fill).
4) Scroll-Bar Color
Another incessant little problem that was getting on my nerves really - the color of the scroll bars in the Creately application. Some of you may not have noticed it but it was enough of an issue for at least 5 users to write to us about. So we’ve reverted to the traditional scroll-bar colors that should keep most of you happy.
5) More Shapes
We’ve added a whole bunch of Web2.0 style objects and widgets like social bookmarking icons, tag clouds and the like. Look for the Web 2.0 Widgets library in Creately!
We’ve had so many people request for mind maps - but we really didn’t want to compete with the likes of the many excellent Mind-Mapping tools out there. But so many requests must mean something.
So we put on our thinking caps on and got to work to figure out how our smart Knowledge Objects can be leveraged to let you create fast, attractive looking mind-maps on Creately.
It was simple enough. We built a smart KObject set with 2 shapes, namely
Topic
Idea
With these new Shapes and the 1-Click connector you can now quickly develop mind maps on Creately. Just click on the Contextual toolbar to add a new Topic to an Idea (or use the Alt-Drag Keyboard shortcut). Its really that easy and fast.
And all that with the usual collaborative goodness that is Creately. Comment, Embed, Share and Publish anywhere. Check it out- it’s Free.
Many of you are using Creately to put together some wonderful UML, entity relationships and other diagrams that require multiple connectors be connected between the shapes. That’s something you can do real easy with Creately’s magic Gluepoints.
Here’s a 1-min video that shows how to use gluepoints in Creately to create multiple connection points betwen shapes that stick to where they should be and are smart enough to route themselves when you move your objects around.
Hope this was useful. Drop us a line with more video tutorial suggestions, or if you have any questions.
@charanjit
This 2-min video demonstrates how easy it is to link to diagrams with Creately - Online Diagramming & Design and turn a simple sitemap into a rich environment for website planning & design.
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So we’ve decided to use this Creately Help Topic to present Video Tutorials of the many ways you can enjoy Creately’s features in everyday work.
We kick off with our Diagram Linking feature. Diagram linking lets you link objects in your diagrams to an external URL or a Creately diagram.
1) External URL - this could be any standard website address, like http://www.myclient.com.
2) An Internal Creately Diagram - This opens ups great possibilties for Sitemaps, Mockups and even software design.
Check it out.
Leave us your feedback and suggestions for more Video Tutorials.
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.
We’ve had so many people request for mind maps - but we really didn’t want to compete with the likes of the many excellent Mind-Mapping tools out there. But so many requests must mean something.
