Lovely Charts

I realize some people might think it’s taking waaay too long before we get to a public release, and I would probably agree to some extent, but there’s definitely a lot of work going behind producing a commercial-ready software and I still need to pay the bills while this comes together… All in all, this is truly an amazing experience to live!
That being said, I’m very proud to announce Beta 4 left the staging phase and is now available to all Beta participants! As usal, this new version comes with a bunch of bug fixes and improvements, such as:

• A lot of “interaction” bug fixes, including some rather edgy cases involving complex interaction scenarios… Fixing this kind of bug is always very rewarding, as they can sometimes be very hard to reproduce and nail down.
• A new canvas panning mechanism. You can now move your entire canvas around using contextual arrows at each side of the canvas. Note that you can still use the hand tool or simply press SPACE and drag to move the canvas, but these arrows should make large diagrams navigation easier.
• Sexy email templates. Not a huge thing, but definitely an improvement and a step towards public release.
• A completely overhauled backend, supposedly more efficient, and certainly more powerful, notably allowing for versionning and collaboration comments.
• Versioning support. Premium account holders will have access to all the previous versions of any diagram they’ll create
• Collaboration. This is big news, even if only premium account holders will benefit from it: You can now share your diagrams with other people, collboratively add comment to each version individually until your team is happy with the result.

One very important note regarding this new version: as I’ve already said, the backend is completely brand new, which means I’ve had to migrate all the existing data to a totally new database structure. I’ve done my best to ensure the migration process would keep existing diagrams intact, but in case one of your diagrams appears to be completely broken, feel free to drop me a line, I’ve backuped the entire database a minute ago, so we should probably be able to restore it if needed.

I’m overall very happy with this version, as the product is definitely maturing with every release and is now starting to be both very stable and usable. Looking back at the first beta, it’s uncomparable, I can’t even believe I once dared to let other people play with beta 1 :)
But the biggest news with this new beta version is that it will likely be the very last private beta version! I already said public beta was for very soon, but believe me, I think we are very very close from it. Beta testers, please forward any bugs you spot to: beta@lovelycharts.com , we are closer than ever to getting this thing out, and I really want to make this happen asap, so I need your help !

Thanks a lot for all the help and encouragements provided, you’ve been great!