Digramly - build diagrams online with great ease for free

http://www.diagram.ly/

by zerop • 14 years ago

210 65 14 years ago

bsinger• 14 years ago

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.

ahy1• 14 years ago

I have to say that this is the easiest diagramming tool I have ever used. I am impressed!

ajb• 14 years ago

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.

jrlatent• 14 years ago

'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.

pfraze2• 14 years ago

I actually thoughts this thing struct a pretty good balance of power & ease of use.

obtu• 14 years ago

Nice history of participating here: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jrlatent

rollypolly• 14 years ago

Have you tried this one?

http://www.gliffy.com/

dserodio2• 14 years ago

Agreed, the UI for drawing arrows is a bit confusing.

tdenkinger• 14 years ago

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.

sparknlaunch12• 14 years ago

Awesome!

May lack some sharing functionality but some really neat objects available and really easy to user.

mtrimpe• 14 years ago

+1 on the sharing functionality.

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' ...

davidjgraph6• 14 years ago

Cloud storage and file sharing coming very very soon...

vasco• 14 years ago

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)

web_chops2• 14 years ago

Circuit lab (https://www.circuitlab.com/) is pretty good too.

compumike2• 14 years ago

(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.

dedene• 14 years ago

Amazing tool! Well done :) Which company is behind this?

sashametro• 14 years ago

Given that it is "powered by mxGraph," which is a product of jGraph, that would seem to be the company.

SpaceDragon• 14 years ago

Very timely, since I'm getting ready to plan out a major project. This is going to be prominently bookmarked. Thanks!

mojuba2• 14 years ago

Neat and very easy to use. This tool made me hate diagrams a bit less ;)

Obviously this is a missing component in Google Docs (and even done in the same spirit). Good chance Google will acquire this... or build their own.

tuxychandru• 14 years ago

Google docs does have drawing tools. Insert > Drawing...

mojuba2• 14 years ago

Except Google's Drawing is a simple drawing, not a diagram.

jpalomaki• 14 years ago

It would be nice to have "gist" like functionality. Users could embed the diagrams to their blogs, others could fork their own copies.

daniel_iversen• 14 years ago

VERY nice... will try and use that next time, well done!

rvavruch• 14 years ago

Will give this a go next time. I have been using Lucidchart http://www.lucidchart.com/ which is one of the better diagramming tools I've tried.

bestest• 14 years ago

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? ;]

davidjgraph6• 14 years ago

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.

johnnyg• 14 years ago

This tool badly needs to generate a URL along that top that when shared loads the diagram I just created...

davidjgraph6• 14 years ago

We've integrated it with Google Drive, so you can now share the document via that.

dserodio2• 14 years ago

I'm missing a simple UML dependency arrow, like the "uses" but without the text (looks cleaner IMHO).

davidjgraph6• 14 years ago

Double click on the edge (or any cell) to edit the text. In this case, just remove it.

momma-joe2• 14 years ago

nice, i've been using Flowchart.com which gives me collaboration.

momma-joe2• 14 years ago

nice, i've been using Flowchart.com which offers real time collaboration too!

web_chops2• 14 years ago

Nice work.. I didn't expect it to be so responsive. Almost feels like using a desktop application.

sjs382• 14 years ago

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.

davidjgraph6• 14 years ago

If you contact us at forum.jgraph.com, we'd be interested in the input that produces the wrong output.

nkh• 14 years ago

Does anyone know of a library that you could use as a basis to build similar functionality?

crazybuddha• 14 years ago

- If you want just drag and drop use jQuery UI.

- If you want to connect divs use jsPlumb.

- 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.

darkstar999• 14 years ago

http://cappuccino.org/ - Javascript and objective-j. It's not a library, but a framework.

simonsarris• 14 years ago

My company makes goxam.com which is a powerful WPF/Silverlight diagramming library.

We are also in private alpha for GoJS (gojs.net), which is the same library ported to HTML5 Canvas.

If you are interested in seeing GoJS once it is released as a more public alpha or beta please email me (see profile)

smiler• 14 years ago

The people who created diagramly used their library which they sell.

http://www.jgraph.com/mxgraph.html

Karunamon• 14 years ago

Impressive! I especially like the image search and how it jumps right into the app without any preliminaries like a signup page or a plea for cash.

..And it exports in almost every format that matters. I'll definitely be using this next time I need to put a diagram together.

veyron• 14 years ago

The service is called 'Diagramly' not 'Digramly'

psawaya• 14 years ago

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.

ww520• 14 years ago

Very nicely done. I like how the menu work. Especially how the Open and Save mapped to browser's upload and download. Excellent work!

blahbap• 14 years ago

I'm impressed it works well on an IPad - good job!

aespinoza• 14 years ago

This is very cool. But then I look at the maker of the Diagram Library and the cost per license is $7,900 dollars ???

Talk about expensive libraries.

leeoniya• 14 years ago

this is pretty sweet.

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.

Cieplak• 14 years ago

It is very impressive that it works flawlessly in IE7.

LeafStorm• 14 years ago

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.

radiowave• 14 years ago

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.

galaktor• 14 years ago

Without wanting to go too off-topic here...but My favorite, light-weight UML editor is UMLet http://www.umlet.com/

As featured on Fowler's blog a while back: http://martinfowler.com/bliki/UmlAsNotes.html

blvr• 14 years ago

A few things that would make me use this:

- 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?

pcd• 14 years ago

It's awesome!! But why is it free? Seems like this is a pretty slick product that you could be making money off.

Are you hoping to be bought? Are you just trying to help people out? Are you already rich?

As I said, it's awesome, and I'm going to use it. But I just want to understand the motivation!

bostonvaulter2• 14 years ago

Maybe they should require money for exporting to a local copy and offer online sharing for free, or the other way around.

davidjgraph6• 14 years ago

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.

K2h2• 14 years ago

Very very nice.

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.

Thanks for making this tool.

alanbyrne• 14 years ago

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!

lsiebert2• 14 years ago

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.

lsiebert2• 14 years ago

For future readers: Mentioned diagramming programs/apps

http://www.diagram.ly (based on mxGraph, a javascript lib)

http://www.lucidchart.com/

http://www.gliffy.com/ (requires flash)

https://www.circuitlab.com/

http://www.umlet.com/ (download)

http://www.flowchart.com

http://docs.google.com (drawings not diagrams)

gojs.net (still in private alpha)

I'd add that I've tried:

http://www.lovelycharts.com

http://www.cacoo.com (flash)

Digramly - build diagrams online with great ease for free

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