Solo Technology

Stumbled over this one earlier today (probably saw it on Digg I suppose). From the folks who recently rolled out ajaxWrite, there is now ajaxSketch. From their blog:

As promised we’re announcing a new product each week on ajaxLaunch.com. This week we’re unveiling ajaxSketch. It’s an object-oriented drawing program suitable for creating flow charts, org charts, simple diagrams, maps, etc. ajaxSketch can open, edit and save files in SVG, an open standard graphic format, making it compatible with Adobe Illustrator, Microsoft Visio, Open Office Draw, Corel Draw, Inkscape, and many others, all of which support SVG.

The word simple sums it up pretty well. Simple to get started (no registration needed). Simple to use. Simple feature set… You can definitely do lines, boxes and text, no doubt about it. Don’t plan on getting too overly fancy of course. This isn’t Visio just yet. But if you need to throw something together in a hurry, this seems like it would fit the bill.

If the feature set gets a bit more polished, this would be pretty sweet. I was going to throw together a little diagram to demo here, but I ran out of patience. Not with performance of it — that’s quite impressive. But editing a sketch is just too painful. I’m spoiled. I miss the boxes having “anchors” for lines to snap to. And if you can edit a line after drawing it, I’m sure not finding that option (like move or resize). Want to change the font of text after adding it? Delete it and retype it appears to be the way that’s done. So yeah… not quite done yet, but a nice start.

Myself, I’m holding out for Gliffy.

One Response to “AjaxSketch - online drawing”

1. Peter on March 30th, 2006 6:47 am
   

   I haven’t looked at any Ajax-based drawing tools, so I’m fairly ignorant of their feature sets. What I’d expect to see though, is some sort of permalink that would be provided if you decided your drawing/diagram/whatever was worth recalling for later reference. Either that, or a PNG export. SVG wouldn’t really fit the bill if I was only looking to craft a quick diagram for embedding in a OpenOffice document. I guess you could take a screenshot of the browser, but that would be clunky.

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