Lovely Charts

So, the last couple of weeks have been pretty wild, with tons of emails flowing in, user feedback to digest and customers to support (thank you all!), all that while still trying to deliver on a running consulting engagement, crazy times!
The good news however is that, starting tomorrow, I’ll have a lot more time to work on Lovely Charts’ future and polish up this lovely experience, so you should normally get to see more and more frequent and important updates in the upcoming weeks!
Nevertheless, with the intention of adhering to the agile motto of “Release Early, Release Often”, I’m happy to bring you today the following small improvements:

• PDF Export (premium accounts only): Premium account holders now can export their diagrams directly in the PDF format, for quick and easy distribution and printing. This is a quick, temporary solution where diagrams are simply embedded as PNG bitmaps into PDF documents, it’s not yet the full-blown vector PDF export I know some people expect, but obviously this requires a lot more work. Bear with me, my intention is still to have vector export in (PDF, SVG, maybe EPS?) at some point.
• Enhanced connection snapping: “high quality output” being a core driver to the project, we need to make it easy for you to create diagrams where items are properly aligned, where connections “snap” to the center or corners of symbols etc etc… Therefore, one thing that was missing previously was an easy and proper way of creating straight connections that were perfectly horizontal or vertical when not connecting remarkable points such as centers or corners. This is now a shortcoming of the past, connections that used to be almost horizontal or vertical will now be perfectly horizontal or vertical !
• Diagrams are now ordered by creation date, in descending order, so the most recent ones always show on top.
• Fixed a couple of bugs with some symbols, such as the Horizontal Arrow which used to expand on its own when editing its label, or the Text symbols that did not allow for horizontal text alignment!
• Fixed a bug that caused saved diagrams to appear as empty when opened back.
• Fixed a bug with UI controls focus that could occasionaly lead to strange UI behaviours, given some very specific scenarios.
• Added a validator to the export form to prevent users from specifying invalid file names, which previously failed silently
• Fixed a bug with connections Z-layer ordering which resulted in some strange results from time to time

Please continue to let me know if you encounter any issues with Lovely Charts, or think of a feature you need, I love it!