Lovely Charts

This will come as old news for those who already noticed or learned the news via some early twitter buzz or a couple of lovely , lovely, lovely articles (thank you all!!!), but I’m still proud to announce here that, as of 01 February 2009, Lovely Charts is fully available for all, at http://my.lovelycharts.com!

This marks the beginning of a new exciting and challenging era that I’ve really been looking forward to during these last 2 years spent designing and developping Lovely Charts… As experienced as I am with RIA training, consulting, design and development, the art f building and developing a product-based business is definitely lot less familiar grounds to me, but that’s precisely what makes it an even more exciting challenge, one that I am willing to meet !

Now, besides the announcement, there’s also a couple of other things I would like to use this post for:

First, a big big big big thank you I never took the time to express,

• To all the beta testers who provided amazing feedback during the beta period. Lovely Charts is still not perfect, but I don’t know of any software that is, even those with armies of developers and QA engineers behind them :). User feedback is definitely the most valuable asset to any software, I think I’ll never thank you girls and guys enough!
• To Ben from Deaxon for the gorgeous presentation website. If you ever need an interaction designer with a strange haircut but a great sense of humor and above all amazing talent and eye for detail, then Ben’s the man you need.
• To Renaud for the drop dead gorgeous symbols library. The guy is so talented you would normally hate him, if only he wasn’t one of the nicest person on earth.
• To Kristian, for the initial motivation and always great discussions
• To Mark James, for his famous icons library I’ve, as many many others, shamelessly abused in many areas of the app. Amazing work.
• To Adobe Systems, for the fantastic Flash platform and tools, but also for indirectly funding this adventure by occasionally employing my humble consulting services
• To my fantastic wife Marie for her love, support, and sound advices. Grou !
• Finally, to all, friends and family, but also complete strangers, for support and feedback. This has been a great adventure so far, and it’s only getting started!

Second, I’ll try to give more details on how things move on a regular basis on this blog, but I would like to very quickly give a first update on what’s coming up next in Lovely Charts:

• Extended character support. I know a lot of users have been frustrated by the fact that Lovely Charts only currently support a basic character set (basically Basic Latin)… With Lovely Charts still being a web application, and character embedding being a tricky question when it comes to embedding very large character sets such as asian alphabets, I can’t promess now we’ll soon support all the languages of the world, but I can say we’ll work on this. Concretely, I think german, nordics, and extended latin characters will be supported very soon, this week still maybe!
• Custom icons. This is probably the most sought-after feature, and I definitely understand why. It was deliberately kept out of this release so that V1 could get released, but don’t worry, I know it’s wanted, and this will be in soon!
• PDF Export, and direct emailing will be added soon as well
• Last but not least, an AIR version is in the works, which will allow its users to work offline and save editable diagrams locally, while retaining the ability to share and collaborate when connected.

There’s definitely a lot more to say and do, but I think that should already be a couple of great first steps!