Cute. Spent a bit of time trying to figure out how to get an arrow: It's not obvious that you need to drag to get an arrow object, because if you just click without dragging, all the other objects will create a new instance at top left. I started out assuming that the UI would be select the object, then click to make a new instance where you wanted it. So, once an object appeared, I thought the intended UI was, click to get object, move it to where you wanted. I think you need to either not create a new object unless the user does drag, so they understand that something more is required (which is how visio seems to do it) or make 'new instance at top left' work for all objects.
The UI for arrows was hard to figure out for a few minutes, but once I did I found it to be the right experience. Drag into space, you get an arrow to the same shape; drag to another shape, you get and arrow to that shape. That feels nice.
I think there's a bug here, maybe only some people are seeing it.
You're describing the UI for drawing/connecting the lines (optionally with arrows) which is very nice. What's strange is that every other shape if you click on it produced an item in the top left which you can drag to the required position and size. But, at least for me, the lines don't do this, you need to drag from the palette onto the screen then drag the ends onto boxes or where you want them. Seems strange to me.
'Cute' is the right word for this -- it lacks basic functionality. I've been using http://www.lucidchart.com for a while which is an amazing browser-based experience.
This is the easiest and best way I've ever found to draw electrical circuits. Oh my god. So much components. I'm shaking in happiness for all the time I won't have to waste trying to fight inkscape & friends. (Not even mentioning latex packages to do this)
(Note: I'm a developer of CircuitLab.) It used to surprise me to see just how common it was for people to use general-purpose drawing/diagramming tools for electronics. In fact, Inkscape plus copy+paste is the de-facto schematic tool of choice for the Wikipedia project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Electron... ! Nothing against Inkscape -- in fact, Inkscape is what we use to prepare symbols for insertion into CircuitLab -- but it really says something about how painful a lot of electronics-specific software must be that users will jump to general purpose vector drawing tools instead.
Feature request: hold down the space bar to get a drag cursor that moves the whole workspace around. (And ideally also hold spacebar + cmd to get a zoom in cursor, spacebar + option for a zoom our cursor.) These controls are used by every Adobe app (and have been widely adopted by other drawing/graphics software) and they’re amazingly useful, because they make it lightning fast to alternate between moving around the canvas and doing whatever else.
We've currently got Ctrl+Drag (or Cmd+Drag on OS X) for panning around the workspace, and the mouse wheel up/down is mapped to zooming in/out. (Probably need to better document these somewhere!) Compatibility with other keyboard/mouse conventions is something I will pass on to the UI team.
Agree about "amazingly useful ... lightning fast" to switch between modes -- we just added a keyboard shortcut for re-running the last simulation, just so we could eliminate the burden of explicit mode switching between schematic capture and simulation.
This is one of the nicest browser-based drawing tools I've seen. While I can't see it replacing Inkscape for most of my work, the ability to edit the mxGraph markup is super cool, along with the SVG export option.
I like this! I tried to bookmark it with Cmd+D, and noticed you trapped that keyboard event for the duplicate function. It might be better to use shift instead of meta to avoid colliding with copy, paste, etc.
I am actually looking for a decent UML editor. So I create a class, click it, expecting to get at the very least a couple of text areas labeled "Methods" and "Fields." Instead, I get a WYSIWYG editor that looks like it came out of the early 2000's. My immediate reaction was to jump back and shout "DAAAAAA!" (I am not joking about that.)
Now, obviously I don't know exactly what your target audience for this is. But in general, my experience is that if you provide a WYSIWYG editor, the users will do horrible, horrible things to your content. They are usually prone to glitching out in addition. And more specifically, for editing UML, a WYSIWYG editor is just about worthless - it provides no structure to the data, and it makes it incredibly easy to bork up the structure of the class. (Also, the editor doesn't really mesh with your site's design very well.)
So, my advice would be to provide a bit more structure to the content of individual diagram elements (at the very least, separate text boxes for Name, Methods, and Fields in a UML class), and find a less obtrusive WYSIWYG editor if you decide to continue going down that route.
OTOH, I found adding properties and methods using the text editor to be much quicker than the clicking/tabbing around in a dialog box which is the way it's done in UML editors I've used. So I don't know what the right balance is.
What killed it for me, for UML, is that the properties and methods don't have their own connector points for attaching an arrow to.
Interesting. There's no Facebook 'like' button, but there are Google Plus and Twitter social networking widgets. Is this some kind of a transparent statement or a rebellious move against Facebook as a non technical target audience? ;]
Neither of us that write diagramly have a facebook account, although we do sometimes wish we had one so every person we know could invite us to take their "10 questions about your rabbit" quiz. We're too old and out of date to use this modern technology, it just gets us flustered.
a feature that i have yet to see anywhere (which would be trivial to add, btw), is labeling the actual connection endoints, like with IP or MAC addresses in network diagrams.
also something that probably needs to be implemented in the mxGraph lib is obstacle avoidance during connection routing, so that routes don't run into or under other objects, this is non-trivial.
bonus would be allowing a connection re-route only to specific "alternate" endpoints or ones that match some definable ruleset when a block is moved around on the diagram.
- Shapes for user interface widgets (windows, buttons, text fields, etc.) for desktop and mobile
- A way to easily share my diagrams via a url (could be as easy as generating a url in the form of http://www.diagram.ly/?diagram=[hash of the xml])
- Direct uploading of exported images to a image sharing website (e.g. imgur). Although you might be able to generate a little revenue by hosting them yourself and serving them up alongside an ad?
One observation, on the export it looked like it was trimming the result and not including the entire lines. I had two circle shapes, one over the other and at export it clipped the top of the top shape, and bottom from bottom. Almost like the math is calculating from the center of the line shape and forgot to account for the line thickness when calculating export cropping.
That is great, well done! I'll be using this a fair bit!
A thing that annoyed me, when I double clicked an object to type text it, it seemed to type the text at the top, rather than the middle of the object. Once I was done editing, it popped to the middle. Not a big deal, but the only negative thing I could find!
Hmm... I might be able to us this for doing programming structure charts. I've unfortunately yet to find a program or app that has all the things I want with WYSWYG, much less groups them, but this has most of them.
Would love the ability to upload my own vectors for use, and to create a custom group of vectors.
I love diagram.ly. I use it all the time to create sitemaps and flow diagrams. My only complaint is that exporting diagrams doesnt always product the result you wanted the first time, but it usually just takes some setting tweaks to get it right.
It's great that you're just dropped into the editor, but when you actually cook up a quick little diagram there's nowhere to go but 'Export to' > 'Save to disk' > 'Open Twitter' > 'Upload & share' ...
- If you want flowcharts use jsPlumb + jQuery UI. jQuery to drag elements on to the diagram div and jsPlumb to connect them.
You can achieve almost every thing what ever is being done here. I have used it personally to create something very similar. jsPlumb is MIT License, so you don't have worry about any thing.
We don't like/understand or want to enter the market for selling to end users (low cost, high volume, high earache, low clue). We sell the underlying JavaScript diagramming library at higher cost in lower volume and I find the more developers pay, the more polite they are to deal with.
This is simply the main example application that ships with the library. We just deploy it on Google App Engine, it does all the availability and scalability for us. Because it's pretty much entirely client-side, we pay trivial costs for serving a little static bandwidth and it gives us free marketing for the library.
So, it will stay fully featured for free and I don't want to pollute it with ads and you'll be seeing a large number of new features added through this year. We're also considering open sourcing the diagramly part (not the core mxGraph, you'll be able to use that hosted Google Maps style) so people can throw up their own custom diagramly sites.
