Flowchart.com is nominated in AO Global 250 Competition in the Enabling Tools and Devices category.

AlwaysOn and KPMG have officially launched this year’s AlwaysOn Global 250 Top Private Companies competition. The AO Global 250 is a competition for the top emerging private companies that are creating new business opportunities in the global technology industries. This includes private companies that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technology in the following sectors:

SaaS and Enterprise
Cloud and Infrastructure
Wireless
Consumer Internet
Digital Media
Greentech
Enabling Tools and Devices
Digital Education (new category for 2009)

We’re thankful to the Always-On network for this nomination. We’re working very hard to bring Flowchart.com out of beta, we hope to reach this goal soon! In the meantime, we encourage all our full time users and drive by testers to give us their feedback. Your feedback is important!

Flowchart.com 2.1 version is a tightly integrated update. Once you start Flowchart.com you will notice all options are available to you without you having to exit the editor.

UI

You’ll notice the new UI for the Editor. This version of the UI works good for screen resolution of 1024×768 and up. User testing showed that the new Toolbox/Preview/Simple Objects windows layout inside the
editor makes for a better user experience. We took all your feedback and came up with this new UI. Your continuous feedback is highly appreciated and used in our updates, so don’t stop send your suggestions and ideas.(click the “send feedback” slider button in the editor to send feedback about any aspect of Flowchart.com).

There is basic Help that describes the new UI. Press the ? icon inside the Editor for more information. We will continue to improve the help to make it more context sensitive in the near future.

Scripting Engine

We rewrote the scripting engine from scratch. We have Script to flowchart, Souce code to flowchart and we’ve added scripting capability to simple flowchart objects. You can now write Flowchart.com scripts (which is exactly like Javascript) to extend the basic flowchart objects. In the next post I’ll show you how you can
extend functionality of a basic object very easily by adding powerful features to a object using scripting.

Marketplace

Marketplace has had a complete overhaul, we’ve added ability to accept micro payments for users wishing to buy/sell their scripts and clipart  (Buying and selling - isn’t enabled in the beta version)

What’s improved?

Every aspect of the Flowchart.com has gotten a improvement.

• Real time collaboration and chat has a 100% improvement in speed, We integrated a better method to collaborate in real time.
• Recording and playing back of flowchart has better frame rate control
• Export to PDF/PNG format has been given a boost.

and many many little improvements you will notice that makes the Flowchart.com experience better.

Give it a try and send us your feedback via the “send feedback” form. We’re always listening.

My next post will follow with what’s new in 2.1. Stay tuned.

- Record/Playback charts: Now when you record a chart session, You will also be recording the chat session for later playback.

- Text color in PDF/PNG : Text color issues are fixed when you save your chart in, PDF/PNG formats.

- Text wrapping now knows the boundary of the page.

- Few collaboration bugs.

- Now flowchart supports all languages and localizations. We can expand the UI to support different languages.  International fonts rendering, rotating, expanding works fully now.

- Added Clipart features : For flowchart-symbols added ability to manipulate them like simple objects. You can change colors, line styles etc.

- Record/Playback is much more smoother.

Feed back most welcome.

The evolution of the web has been happening in stages, as technologies mature, so are the offerings people create. When we first conceptualized online flowchart system we planned to build a eco-system along with it. An eco-system that was product centric. There wasn’t any to be found.

Web 2.0 buzz was taking shape then(2006) What we saw was people building excellent technologies that have API’s to mash up with other technologies, but not really enhancing their application features, it was still like the old Boxed software days where users request are queued and when/if the developer liked or found the time to add it, they did. We needed to go a step above.

Flowchart.com has a built in Marketplace where designers/developers can use the API and build tools, scripts, objects which they can either sell to other users or share it for free. This produce specific eco-system where users can enhance the application and can profit from it is our reason to call ourselves Web 3.0 software service. Irving Wladawsky-Berger Blog post has a great phrase by Nigel Coats that suits Web 3.0 very well and it is how Flowchart.com is built - framework in which events happen

1) Center of rotation for objects now stick to last know position.
2) script and object optimization on safari browser.