It’s just 5 days into Beta and I would say that things are looking great! While I think that the process of ironing out various bugs are being done quite effectively, it would make sense to highlight the many advantages of Creately Desktop’s features (bit by bit) leading up to the official release.
Users of Creately would know that this app has always been about working on diagrams and sharing them with ease, wherever you are. Collaborating on diagrams within your own team with publishing that’s 100% secure, and embedding diagrams on Google sites and social media is part and parcel of the Creately experience. Moreover, users would also be familiar with its intelligent features like how when embedding a diagram (via the Diagram Viewer) on a Google site would still mean that you could make changes to the diagram on Creately, thereby updating those changes on the Diagram Viewer.
So what more could we offer on the desktop version of Creately? Conventionally, when putting out an online app and then the same app as a desktop version, you’d expect them to be two separate products. But (we thought) why don’t we amalgamate both the online and desktop versions? What links both the online and offline versions would be this exciting and potent feature – Diagrams Anywhere.
So when you create a flowchart, mindmap or any other diagram, basically just click the Diagrams Anywhere feature and you can have all your diagrams sync’ed into both the online and desktop platforms. In other words, you get to work on the same diagram either online or offline, whether you are on land, sea or air. Let’s put the benefits of this feature into context. Let’s say your boss wants you to amend an organizational flowchart that he has shared with you. You can work on it offline while travelling and once you do get connected, it’ll automatically update itself.
To put this into perspective, we’d like to invite you to try the Beta version. Let us know what you think and you could enjoy the true awesomeness of Creately Desktop the day it is officially launched at a discount.
Does creately have any plans to create a standards-based product, for example using HTML5? Using Adobe is a show-stopper for a large number of potential users. Frankly I’d be happy to buy a less-capable product, rather than use a free Adobe-based product.
Hi Scott,
Thanks for the comment and sorry for the slow reply. We do not have any immediate plans to create a HTML5 version of Creately, although we do have a Creately Diagram Viewer that is HTML and Javascript based. We have used Adobe Flash as our platform of choice due to it’s maturity, feature richness and consistency across platforms. I know that HTML 5 has come on a long way but it still isn’t quite as good as Flash for doing some really cool things in the web browser. Flash has allowed us to make Creately available to a very wide audience with minimal changes to support so many browsers and operating systems. In the future this might change substantially and we will continue to watch HTML5, conduct our experiments and listen to our users needs. Please stay tuned.
Thanks
Nick