Lovely Charts

Wow, that one took longer than expected! Apologies for the lack of updates lately, things have been going pretty wild over the last months, with tons of things to do on both personal and professional levels… But anyway, tday’s big news is, we’ve just released the much expected (at least by me^^) 3.2 beta release!
No real new features I think, except for the “Lost password?” button that finally made his way into the UI, but a lot of bugs and glitches fixes, some of which were pretty critical (how bad does “all connections disappeared” sound? VERY.) and are hopefully now solved for good (crossing fingers here). A lot of work has also been done behind the curtains to prepare for the final release, such as payment integration for account upgrades, PDF invoice generation etc etc… But this will only be visible when we get out of beta, hopefully sometime by the end of summer (crossing fingers again)?

Speaking of roadmap… This release marks the beginning of “middle scale” testing, as we will be slowly moving from private to public beta over the next weeks. I’ve just added something like a thousand new beta testers this morning, and I intend to add a couple of more batches like this over the next days/weeks, depending on how things go…. If everything goes well, then we’ll take a deep breath, and dive into public beta this summer. Very exciting, but very scary as well

I had the nice suprise yesterday to discover Lovely Charts was amongst the 3 finalists of the “Experimental” category of the Web Flash Festival 2008, definitely one of, if not the, largest french-speaking multimedia event: http://www.flashfestival.net/2008/#/15/… I’m not too much of an award fan, but it’s always nice to see your work appreciated (btw, huge thank you to all those blogs/websites that have mentionned Lovely Charts in the past months ! :), and a bit of publicity definitely can’t hurt, as we are getting closer than ever to a public release (more on that very soon ;)… So cheers to the organization and jury of the festival for preselecting Lovely Charts, and see you end of may in Paris!

Just a quick note to let you know we just deployed Beta 3.1, with a couple of “rather minor” bug fixes, and, more importantly, support for transparent PNG export !… A long awaited feature that we hadn’t had the time yet to look into, but that makes a huge difference for professional users, who can know freely integrate their Lovely Charts with custom backgrounds and all sorts of complex compositions, overall making it possible and easy to use Lovely Charts in conjunction with professional CAD software, using each application for what it’s best at!… Next big step: make these keyboard shortcuts work on Mac, stay tuned

We just pushed Beta 3 out a few minutes ago, and I have to say, it’s a huge update!

Before getting into this release’s details, I need to start with a slightly negative, but important note: with this update, major changes occured, that notably affected both the coordinate system used in LC and the resize mechanisms, implying the content of previously saved diagrams has “moved”, both in size and position… In order to limit the trouble, we ran an upgrade script that moved existing diagrams in a position pretty close to where they were originally created, but it’s definitely not perfect, and your diagrams have probably slightly changed by now… Sorry about that, that’s part of the risk with Beta software, it’s not finished yet and things that might change as the product evolves towards a stable public release…

Now, that being said, this release is a HUGE step forward, tons of bugs were corrected, and many many many enhancements implemented for a better user experience! Here are some random notes on what has been changed/done:
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David published last week the first two articles of a great serie on Flex Architecture Fundamentals: the basics and client/server communications.
David has both a great real-world experience applying these RIA architecture principles and brilliant pedagogical skills, so these articles are definitive must reads for any aspiring or even seasoned RIA developer. If you belong to one of these two categories, I can only strongly recommend you check them out, and bookmark the blog to make sure you don’t miss the next articles (btw, if you’re into RIA development, make sure you check on David’s FCG project, it’s brilliant)!

But if you are not a developer, and simply curious about Lovely Charts and what it can produce, David’s articles also feature a couple of great diagrams created with Lovely Charts, which makes his articles one of the first real world example of LC in action, so special thanks for that!

So, I’m getting more and more requests by people who registered for the beta, didn’t get an invite yet, and legitimately wonder why… So I figured I’d write this post to give you a little update on where we are at now, what the plans are for the upcoming weeks, and why is it that everyone is not registered yet

At the moment, we have around 200 people active on the beta test. These people have been until now providing fantastic feedback (again, thanks a lot to all!!), helping to already establish a list of a ton of things to work on, fix and improve. That list is certainly not final, and I’m pretty sure more testers, coming from more different horizons, will find more bugs and come up with more suggestions, and I’m really looking forward to it.
But the truth is, the priority after all is to fix the bugs and do what’s needed on each and every suggestion, one at the time, in order for this process to progress efficiently. And this is precisely what I’m doing right now, fixing stuff, improving things, so that, as soon as possible, we can release a new version, invite more people to the tests, and so on and so on, so that slowly but surely we progress towards a stable release.

Bear in mind the whole idea of a beta test is precisely to gather feedback in order to improve software quality, believe me, if there’s one guy on earth that wants badly this app to be ready for public consumption and made available to all ASAP, well that’s me

Thanks again for your patience and interest, and my apologies if this is taking too long, I can promess we are not trying to prevent you from using Lovely Charts, we simply want it to be as good as it can be before we release it into the wild

I just updated the beta to beta 2.2 tonight. In my humble opinion, the new version adds many positive things to the overall user experience, notably by giving the user a much better feedback when using the Create & Connect tool or when exporting images of their diagrams.

So, besides the usual bug fixes, the focus of this new version was really on trying to add/improve/tweak little things that, based on the first testers feedback, would make LC even more lovely
Amongst these things, on my todo list for a better UX, was “work on the goddamn keyboard shortcuts”… And I must admit that, even if I decided to release this version because after all I’m very happy with the UX improvements mentionned above, I also feel immensely frustrated by the keyboard shortcuts bit…

For those that don’t know, Lovely Charts is a Flex application, running as a SWF file inside a little software called the Adobe Flash Player, which is installed on top of your web browser as a plugin or activeX control. The Flash player is a fantastic piece of software, combining a super small footprint (explaining in great deal its almost-ubiquity) with some truly amazing capabilities. It’s a beautiful technology. But the combination of the player’s small footprint and the fact that it’s embedded and running inside web browsers also brings many limitations along. Read more »

Ok. I’ve added “Donate” buttons on most internal pages of this website, as well as on this blog page. By using these, if you wish, you can support the development of Lovely Charts while we are still in test mode, thereby raising the chances of seeing a decent, stable, mature release coming out one day.

This project is completely self-funded, we have absolutely no VC or business angel backing, which is great because it allows for total freedom regarding the direction of the app, but on the other side, I must confess it’s sometimes a bit hard to keep up and hold some steam… Still need to pay the bills after all:).
So yeah, I decided to add these buttons… If you like this product, and think it’s worth encouraging its development towards a mature product, any help is truly appreciated… Donations will, amongst other things, help to pay for:

• development and testing time. This is by far the biggest cost, time is über expensive.
• design and creation of lovely symbols
• hosting

Now, if you don’t have a dime and still want to help, join the beta test, we really could use some active testers to stress-test this little thing and help us find out how to improve it!
Thanks!

Ever since I started thinking about Lovely Charts, Ive always had in mind a nice little tool that would “just” be sexy, simple, and cheap… I didn’t want to create a clone of what existed and I absolutely didn’t want to compete with all the complex enterprisey “business drawing” software already on the market.
I believe there’s a need, and a market, for advanced applications with advanced features that make the life of professional power users easier… But I’m also convinced there’s also both a need and a market, for a simple tool that would be used by occasional users that simply need something better and easier than Word or Powerpoint for their occasional little diagrams. And this was definitely the original intention with Lovely Charts.

When I started working on this and explaining the project to early insiders, I was constantly referring to something I guess we could probably call Personas…. My original target user was this young (22/23) cute blond girl from a marketing department or agency, who wanted to make a good impression by presenting lovely diagrams of that new campaign or project she was working on… And definitely not the seasoned business consultant who had been using all sorts of the most advanced features of Visio for years now.
So, during most of the conception and development process, I’ve kept this in mind, and tried to refer to it when considering the inclusion or exclusion of features, trying to achieve the best possible balance between ease of use and power/capabilities that would serve my lovely friend from marketing…

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Thanks to Koen, I’ll be presenting my little Lovely app at this year’s first Adobe User Group Event, on Saturday 26th Jan. in Ghent, Belgium. Even if I’m a little nervous now since this will be one of the first time out for this new born, I’m really looking forward to meet many fellow RIA enthusiast at this occasion, and gather some great live feedback!