Thanks to everyone who downloaded the latest versions of the Confluence plugin and the Gliffy JIRA Plugin.
Not only are you now reaping the benefits through our revised Network Symbols, you had a little fun along the way.

Josh Krupka, of Burris Logistics, found the Golden Gliffy, contacted Gliffy and was randomly selected using Random.org to win the $500.

Thanks to everyone for playing and congratulations to Josh for winning!

The contest may be over, but don’t hesitate to download the new Gliffy Confluence Plugin and the Gliffy JIRA Plugin – a 45-day free trial will increase your productivity by integrating the drawing tool to accompany your Atlassian products. Contact us for an extension to your free trial.

The world’s most popular web-based drawing tool just became twice as good. This morning we dropped the price of our Gliffy JIRA Plugin by half (hence the twice as good).

With the price reduction, we’re making it even easier and more affordable for developers to add high-impact, great-looking diagrams and drawings to their JIRA issues. The Gliffy JIRA Plugin takes what we’ve learned with our wildly-popular Confluence plugin and applies those learnings to the world of JIRA issue tracking, enabling greater understanding and efficiency throughout the development process.

With the suddenly-more-affordable Gliffy JIRA Plugin, you can:

• Increase your productivity and eliminate uncertainty by describing new features and issues with Gliffy drawings.
• Create wireframes to quickly mockup new features that need to be implemented
• Describe user process flows using intuitive flow charts instead of paragraphs of text
• Design software using UML notation

We’re excited about the new pricing and what it means for JIRA users. Take advantage of the new pricing and add the Gliffy JIRA Plugin to your workflow today.

In celebration of the 2.0 release of our Atlassian Plugins, we’re announcing a fun little contest where you can enter for a chance to win a $500 Amazon.com gift certificate.

Here’s how it works:

Simply install the 45 Day Free Trial of the Gliffy Plugin for Confluence or the Gliffy Plugin for JIRA, locate the hidden Golden Gliffy symbol inside the Gliffy Editor, and then email us the code that shows up when you drop the Golden Gliffy onto the drawing stage. You’ll then be entered into a drawing for a chance to win the $500 gift certificate.

Hurry up and install those plugins! Codes must be received by June 19th, 2009.

Just in time for the Atlassian Summit (where we are a sponsor), today we are announcing a number of updates to our popular products, The Gliffy Plugin for Confluence and The Gliffy Plugin for JIRA. Among the updates are a redesigned, more professional looking user interface; improved application usability, default colors, and revision history; and improved and redesigned network symbols. Gliffy’s intuitive drag-and-drop interface combines the power of traditional desktop software with the lightweight, low learning curve and flexible features of today’s most popular browser-based applications. More Atlassian customers use Gliffy to make information visual and easier to understand than any other diagramming plugin.

The Gliffy Plugin for Confluence 2.0.0 also includes an important update to ensure compatibility with the upcoming Confluence 3.0 release.

The updated plugins are available immediately on their respective download pages:

• Confluence Plugin
• JIRA Plugin

An example of the new Gliffy Network Symbols

In addition to the before mentioned updates, a few other minor issues were addressed:

• [GLIFFY-120] - Fitting to screen and then resizing palettes and symbols, won’t let you fit to screen again
• [GLIFFY-200] - Mousing over Flowchart shape in Palette at zoom ‘Fit to screen’ changes its line width
• [GLIFFY-243] - line color ‘no fill’ does nothing
• [GLIFFY-356] - Hard to see rotate widget/icon for shape
• [GLIFFY-1281] - Whitespace should be trimmed from diagram names before they are created
• [GLIFFY-1294] - Highlighted diagram name incorrectly indicates that Diagram is seleted
• [GLIFFY-264] - Evaluate Changing Order of Buttons on Toolbar.
• [GLIFFY-268] - Make Shape Overlay less beefy
• [GLIFFY-274] - Revision History needs rethinking maybe
• [GLIFFY-512] - Improved Interface
• [GLIFFY-477] - Have a ‘help’ button where people expect it
• [GLIFFY-1269] - Enable Lock / Unlock Shape function when multiple shapes are selected

We have just released a new version of the Gliffy Plugin for JIRA. The major update for this release is that now Gliffy seamlessly integrates with Greenhopper. Greenhopper is an excellent JIRA plugin that allows an interactive and simple interface for users to manage their projects, as well as tools to increase the visibility and traceability of ongoing versions. Now, with the Greenhopper and Gliffy plugins installed, when viewing the Planning Board simply click on “Issue Actions” menu on any card. From the dropdown, click on the “Gliffy Diagram” option, and you will instantly be taken to the editor to edit or add a diagram. Once you are finished editing, just click Back to JIRA to the taken back to the Planning Board view.

Download the Gliffy Plugin for JIRA 1.0.1.
Learn more about GreenHopper.
Download the latest version of Greenhopper.

Special thanks goes out to Jean-Christophe Huet at GreenPepper Software for helping us make this happen!

Gliffy Online Performance update

We’ve also done some performance optimizations on our database for Gliffy Online. A key benefit is the faster loading of folders and document lists in the document manager.

Overview

Gliffy, a San Francisco based provider of web based business drawing software, is seeking a Senior Server Side Developer to focus on our J2EE architecture. The developer will be responsible for adding new features, scaling up, and
maintaining our server side architecture.

About Gliffy

Gliffy, founded in 2005, is a profitable software company with a focus on building a sustainible business model around our net-native drawing tool. Prior to founding Gliffy, Chris Kohlhardt and Clint Dickson were involved in the
technical side of building high-profile web applications such as Orbitz.com, Toyota.com, and the ColorSmart application by Behr.

• We use tools and philosphies to work smarter and more efficiently
• We work hard, but try to have fun while we do it
• We’re constantly pushing the bounds of what web applications are capable of, keeping the job challenging and interesting
• We’re excited about what we’re working on, and we hope you will be too!

Qualifications

The candidate MUST be local to the San Francisco area, and should expect to come to our San Francisco office during normal business hours. The candidate MUST have the following experience:

• Minimum 5 years Software Development experience
• Developing database driven Java/J2EE web applications deployed to Tomcat
• Working with SQL
• Test driven development
• Deploying Java applications to Linux/Unix servers
• Writing and maintaining ant build scripts
• Supporting end users who are having problems with the software
• Using wikis or other web based collaborative software

The ideal candidate MUST be willing to learn about, or already have experience with the following:

• MySQL and Hibernate
• PHP,Ruby,Perl and other languages
• REST API’s
• Continuous integration servers such as Bamboo or Cruise Control
• OAuth
• Agile development philosophies
• Managing small teams of remote or local developers
• Implementing COMET support

More about the position

The candidate will be responsible for managing all aspects of the server side infrastructure of Gliffy. For the most part, this means you’ll be working on adding features to our REST API that is powered by our J2EE application
server. The candidate must be a self starter and able to thrive in a startup environment where requirements are not always clearly laid out in advance. You should be pretty good at simplifying problems, and pushing back on features
if they seem excessive…. we’re ok with simplifying features if it means we can get the new version of the product completed sooner! As an early employee in the company, you’ll be expected to take on many roles. You’ll often be
called upon to work on new or existing features, or manage other employees / contractors to do the same.

You’ll be:

• Writing lots of server side Java code
• Managing the continuous integration builds of our products
• Architecting new features with the rest of the team
• Managing other developers

You should definitely be a team player. You should always be always asking yourself “How can we do better?”, and communicate your findings to the rest of the team in a constructive way.

Submitting your Resume

Qualified candidates should email their resume in PDF format to jobs (at) gliffy (dot) com

Learn more about our JIRA Plugin, or download a free 45 day trial.

We never issue discounts on our products, but we thought we’d make an exception for this new product since we’re so excited about it. If you make a purchase before March 15th, 2009, you will receive a 10% discount by including the following discount code: GJIRA03 Discount will be applied after you create an invoice.

Hot on the heals of the 1.5 release of our Confluence Plugin, and right around the time we expect to release our JIRA Plugin, I’ll be presenting both products at the Plugin of the Month Webinar hosted by Atlassian on January 28th.

If you’re interested in learning more about how Gliffy Plugins work with Atlassian products, this is a must attend event, and you should definitely register for the webinar today.

If you like this webinar, you’ll probably be interested in Atlassian’s other fine events coming up, too.

See you at the webinar!

We recommend this upgrade for all users of the Gliffy Plugin for Confluence. Download to upgrade your existing installation, or start a 45 day free trail today

The two major highlights of this release are the new BPMN Symbols, and French and German Translations

BPMN Symbol Library
With this release, Gliffy now enables you to create detailed Business Process Modeling Notation diagrams. Helpful in providing members of your team with a clear picture of your business processes, this symbol library includes events, activities, artifacts, gateways and swimlanes, as well as related connectors.

French and German Translations (Excludes Gliffy Client)

One of the things I learned at the recent Atlassian Developer Camp was that French and German are the only two additional languages that Confluence supports out of the box. As such, we’ve also added support for these two languages on the Confluence Integration side only. We have some major changes to the Gliffy Client that we’ll be working on in 2009 which will enable us to add language support there, too.

Other Improvements and Bug Fixes

In our never-ending quest to improve Gliffy, we’ve made over 30 bugfixes and improvements to the product in this release. Those previously not mentioned are included below:

• [GLIFFY-872] - Legacy Network Shapes have lost connection points
• [GLIFFY-871] - Symbol does not change with resizing: Network / Home Network / Server
• [GLIFFY-773] - Network Cloud shape is blurry when large, especially in expored images and svg
• [GLIFFY-659] - Flowchart multidocument image element has inconsistant colouring
• [GLIFFY-629] - Selection UI control for checkboxes and radio buttons should be a checkbox, not a drop down box.
• [GLIFFY-626] - Color picker for all UI symbols doesn’t function
• [GLIFFY-625] - Color Picker UI symbol doesn’t change color
• [GLIFFY-624] - Video player UI symbol should have a large ‘play’ button in the center (just like youtube does)
• [GLIFFY-623] - Vertical justification of text for ‘Image’ UI shape should be at the top of the shape (but not above it)
• [GLIFFY-621] - Color should be removed from UI symbols that have color
• [GLIFFY-620] - List Box UI symbol should have a scrollbar in it
• [GLIFFY-573] - Text Names for symbols in Symbol Palette left justifies when multiline
• [GLIFFY-452] - Danish characters look broken when Confluence encoding set to ISO-8859-1
• [GLIFFY-797] - Provide user feedback when diagram images fail to render due to out of memory issues
• [GLIFFY-839] - Javascript onclose check should not be applied after clicking return to confluence button
• [GLIFFY-840] - Admin action breadcrumbs are broken
• [GLIFFY-841] - Spaces in diagram name generate error when trying to export Confluence page as PDF
• [GLIFFY-880] - Document manager doesn’t work in Confluence plugin
• [GLIFFY-1018] - Closing tag for links appears to be incorrect.
• [GLIFFY-1024] - Make sure space names (categories) are xml encoded before being returned to the client
• [GLIFFY-1040] - Alignment parameters are broken
• [GLIFFY-1056] - Support Confluence character encoding setting other than UTF-8
• [GLIFFY-1070] - When editor is configured to open in own window, ‘Edit in Gliffy’ links on attachment pages don’t open editor in own window
• [GLIFFY-1023] - IE sets jpeg mime type to image/pjpg
• [GLIFFY-1003] - Edit in Gliffy link on Confluence attachment screen
• [GLIFFY-1041] - Add ‘edit in Gliffy’ links on attachment page
• [GLIFFY-639] - Make sure Confluence Plugin compiles with script limits setting set to max
• [GLIFFY-681] - Make sure we’re using PropertyManager.CHARACTER_ENCODING everyplace
• [GLIFFY-832] - Check for licenses that have been revoked in license manager
• [GLIFFY-876] - update revoked license list

BPMN Symbol Library
Gliffy now allows you to create detailed Business Process Modeling Notation diagrams. These diagrams are helpful in getting stakeholders a clear picture of your business processes. This symbol library includes events, activities, artifacts, gateways and swimlanes, as well as the specific connectors. The multi-lane swimlane symbols have adjustable lanes and the pool headers auto-resize with text input. Most of the new BPMN symbols allow their line and fill color to be user-defined.






Folders for document organization

Due to popular demand by our users, the Document Manager now allows you to organize your Gliffy diagrams into folders. The folders will show in a familiar tree structure on the left hand side. Clicking a folder will list the diagrams in that folder to the right. Want to move a diagram to another folder? Just click and drag it to that folder. Note: If you were using our previous tagging system to organize documents, these tags will be converted to folders under the top level folder called “Account Documents”. Also, any documents that were collaborated with you will be located under “Shared Documents”. Refer to the issues below for more information on the inclusion of folders and the conversion from tags:

• http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-551
• http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-551

Folder Permissions

With the addition of folders for organizing diagrams, Gliffy Online also gives administrators of Premium accounts the ability to add and remove user access/permissions to specific folders in the account. This feature can be found in the Account Manager, accessible to admins from the Document Manager.

No more 5 diagram limit!

When you sign up for Gliffy, you now get a free 30-day trial of our Premium product. This allows you to create unlimited public and private diagrams during the trial period. When the trial period is over, you can still create unlimited public diagrams.

Website and Secure Login

We’ve also added the ability to login to the Gliffy Online application from anywhere on our website. What this allows you to do is use your browser or operating system features to remember the email and password for login. This way, you can now access the document manager with 1-click from the website.

Premium accounts can now login securely. Logging in securely means all data between Gliffy and our servers is encrypted using SSL. This feature is only available to Premium accounts. Please note, running Gliffy in secure mode can cause a decrease in performance, as passing data over a network using the https protocol is slower.

Other Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Legacy Network Shapes have lost connection points - http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-872
• Symbol does not change with resizing: Network / Home Network / Server - http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-871
• Network Cloud shape is blurry when large, especially in expored images and svg - http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-773
• Flowchart multidocument image element has inconsistant colouring - http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-659
• Selection UI control for checkboxes and radio buttons should be a checkbox, not a drop down box. - http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-629
• Color picker for all UI symbols doesn’t function - http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-626
• Color Picker UI symbol doesn’t change color - http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-625
• Video player UI symbol should have a large ‘play’ button in the center (just like youtube does) - http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-624
• Vertical justification of text for ‘Image’ UI shape should be at the top of the shape (but not above it) - http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-623
• Color should be removed from UI symbols that have color - http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-621
• List Box UI symbol should have a scrollbar in it - http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-620
• An account containing exactly 10 users can’t purchase a 10 user account - http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-584
• Text Names for symbols in Symbol Palette left justifies when multiline - http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-573
• The label for the “login” button is moving towards left, when it is clicked more than once. - http://jira.gliffy.com/browse/GLIFFY-15