Solo Technology

I requested and received my beta invite to Flowchart.com today. Seems like somebody has decided to challenge Gliffy in the online diagram space.

Long story short: I’m impressed. This is a pretty slick online application! I’d encourage folks to have a look — while it is in beta, I applied for and then received an invite within 30 minutes.

Flowchart.com is an online multi-user, real-time collaboration flowchart software.

Flowchart.com does not require any software download, it works with your favorite browser such as Fire Fox, IE, Opera, Safari, Konquerer.

Speaking of browsers, I did my initial testing with Firefox 3 RC1.

First impression: It looks just like a desktop application:

(click for larger version)

Isn’t that cool looking? Very reminiscent of Microsoft Visio. And if you’ve figured out any other drawing or flowcharting programs you’ll figure out how to get around in this one.

Performance is pretty decent. I ran into a few instances where a resized shape “lagged” a bit in redrawing itself, but in general it was responsive enough to keep the illusion of a desktop app. (I’m assuming this is all JavaScript so that’s rather impressive).

Once you have a drawing you like, you can export it to PDF or PNG. There are also some sharing and collaboration features, but I’ve not tried them yet. Digging a bit under the sharing options I stumbled over the ability to embed a chart (as an iframe) too. Again, I’ve not experimented yet, but at first blush it would appear that an embedded diagram has the option to be editable… that could be kinda cool in a documentation or wiki scenario.

I have no clue on pricing aside from the current beta being free.

Frankly, if I were Gliffy, I might be a bit nervous (and I’m a fan of Gliffy!).

[via Web Worker Daily]

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