If you’ve ever looked for an easy, intuitive online diagram creation tool, you know how hard it is to find one. LovelyCharts is a brand new application poised to become the default online drawing tool for amazing flowcharts, sitemaps and wireframes.
Like Gliffy, Flowchart.com, and AutoDesk’s experimental Draw project, the app enables you to create diagrams and more in your browser with drag-and-drop functionality. The main differentiator between LovelyCharts and other online services is that it actually makes your complex processes look incredibly good. Better yet, it’s completely free and since last week, out of beta and available to anyone.
In terms of features, LovelyCharts has pretty much all the basics covered, but you really need to try it out to get a feel of how rich the web-based app really is even with its relatively simple feature set. You can draw, align, insert symbols and icons, snap, zoom, import & export, and so on – for a good overview, check the tour and the (non-embeddable for some reason) screencast. My only gripes are that the app is not always as fast as I would like it to be at times, and there’s no way to upload and insert custom symbols, although the latter feature is underway.
There’s also a professional version of LovelyCharts available for €29 a year, which allows users to maintain and collaborate on as many diagrams as they wish and features full history management, sharing functionality and a notification setup.
LovelyCharts is mostly a one-man show, created by RIA developer and user architect Jérôme Cordiez from This Is Lovely!. The project is completely bootstrapped, which is awesome.
Quite a nice tool. I will add this to my list of online tools for easily expressing your creativity.
Anjali Sen
http://smartbab...-sites-for.html
I hate the email confirmation sites… the flow tools i great but can’t we just do without the email confirmation…
I am using spamgang.com everytime anyway so they don’t get anything anyway…
I love this tool! I’m using it for all my IA work, yesterday I found myself using it for 8 hours+
Nice! I’d like to use this.
Flowchart.com has tons of features and constantly improving. Not sure about this one yet but will check it out.
Thanks for this awesome resource.
The tool is really gr8. The performance is awesome.
I think the tool is interesting, will try it out.
Who says a single person cant do a start up!!
http://www.saty...s.wordpress.com
Great tool. We where building a tool for in our CMS. But after seeing this we did not even start. Started using it and real loving it!
Excellent Tool. Very useful. It was more like something expected from the AIR platform from the Adobe folks. The AIR platform is simply awesome and I was expecting an application like this for sometime and here we go. Nicely done.
the stupid confirmation code could not make it to my inbox
Damn it – if I’d known about this a couple of weeks ago I wouldn’t have used Songsmith http://article_...-weird-microsof for my presentation to the board, and I’d still have a damn job.
If *i* hadn’t used Songsmith to write new songs for my band- they wouldn’t have kicked my head in and set my house on fire.
To Flowchart or Not To Flowchart? {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/VSbefdX5Ma_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”To Flowchart or Not To Flowchart? ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/yxHAb0NtQm”}}}
I use flowcharts all the time when I’m discussing web design, script flow, etc with clients…mind map was a cool tool until they ruined it – will definitely try this one.
cirina
http://www.twitter.com/cirina
Thanks!
Another great tool for us…
The screencast is terrible long & slow.
A 1-2 minutes video could make the job.
I’ve had a look at hundreds of different online applications in my time and Lovely Charts has been by far the smoothest and most easy to use one I’ve ever come across.
I couldn’t actually believe it was running in flash and in a browser. it felt more like an offline application, no slow down or sluggishness at all.
I’m really impressed.
It doesn’t have any log out option… is the site secure?
Sounds pretty good. Will try it!
wow..just tried it.i like it too much
Hah! Never thought I’d see the day when I’d scoop Tech Crunch.
http://is.gd/iemi
Glad they’re getting props on a blog that has some readers though. Lovely Charts is great.
Just tried it. Looks lovely indeed. Some minot user interface issues but otherwise great. Line drawing tool (pencil) doesn’t work for me.
Look forward to use this more.
Watch the demo videos and you will learn how to draw with pencil and stuffs. It’s pretty easy once you get used to it.
Looks good.
But, I was actually looking for charts like bar, pie… If anyone is in search of the same, I would say visifire is the best. http://www.visi...rt_designer.php
You fail. VisFire requires Silverlight.
Pretty weak selection of items for wire framing. We use http://www.balsamiq.com and it’s for wire framing only – really good. Same drag and drop, web app.
Take a look at iplotz.com. A similar product.
the URL http://www.iplotz.com
Way to go Jerome! Nice to see bootstrapped products like this make it out the door. Congrats!
Gliffy diagrams look just as nice and the symbol sets contain a lot more network symbols and UML symbols. I’ve been using it for years (it’s Free too).
I revied most of the mention programs and settled with lovelycharts.
This is a great tool, I will use it extensively. Thanks!
Thanks for the tip on this great tool – very simple and efficient, so it will come in handy
very cool and useful. finally a company builds a real product that real people can enjoy.
I saw something in http://www.iplotz.com. However, I like Visio / Kivio (Linux) to do these kinds of things. Iplotz gives you 1 project with five wireframes for free (thats it).
Wow, this product is simply admirable!
This looks like a great program. I’m definitely interested in checking it out. If anyone is looking for a charting solution in a larger org. situation you might take a look at this video about 1OrgChart. Check it out!
http://www.digi...munity_702.aspx