Lovely Charts

Why?

Because I think the iPad is a pretty cool device.
Because I can definitely picture myself (and others) sketching out processes, workflows, structures… in my couch on an iPad.
Because I think it would benefit Lovely Charts’ users.

When Adobe announced Flash CS5 would feature an iPhone/iPad packager, capable of taking existing code and transforming it into a native iApp, I was happy. To be fair, I was also a bit sceptical, but hell, why not afterall?
When I saw the first CS5 exported apps running, I was definitely very happy: performance was fine, user experience was great, that’s all I was asking for.
So I decided I’d use it to make an iPad app…

See, as an independent developer, there’s only so many things I can do with the time I have.
See, I don’t know C++ nor Objective C.
See, I’m not against learning those languages per se, but to be honest, I’d rather spend my time on answering support emails, improving the app’s performances, adding and tweaking functionality…
See, I’d much rather work on all those things that ultimately result in better user experiences.

I already have a pretty robust code base to work from.
I don’t know Objective-C, but I know ActionScript and rich front-end development challenges and optimization techniques like the back of my hand.
I’d like to think that as aTHE User-centered company, Apple would recognize that users don’t care about programming languages, cross compilers or translation layers, as long as the resulting UX is good.

Your recent SDK terms change concerns me, because it implies my app, no matter how good it could be, might never be approved just because of what, “byte code issues”?
Ouch.
That would definitely hurt.
Not Adobe, not Google, but me, and users of my app.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about to best react to his… Anger, disgust, resignation… OR, rather, just stand up for my beliefs in a constructive, peaceful attitude: taking my chances, and use CS5 to build the best possible Lovely Charts companion app for the iPad.
I’ll design it according to your guidelines, and will do my best to make it run in the best possible way on the iPad.
If I fail to produce a high quality result, I’ll just stop and move on with the other platforms, the world is big enough.
If I manage to produce something nice, running smoothly and offering a good user experience, I’ll submit it to the App Store.

If you then decide not to accept it just because of the programing language it’s been originally written with, fair enough, it’s your platform, your rules.
Just know I will be VERY disappointed, and I’ll be vocal about it.

I finally found/took the time for creating a little video preview of the upcoming version 2.0 of Lovely Charts!
Check out the video, and please let me know how you feel about it, either by commenting below, or via email at jerome at lovelycharts dot com
As you will see in the video below, Lovely Charts will become available as an AIR application, capable of running locally on your desktop, save and open local files, but an online edition will remain and will be updated as well.
I expect the beta testing period to begin around november, or more likely december this year, with a public release around march next year I hope.

Just so you know, there’s actually a couple more features coming up that are not unveiled in this video, but I want to hold some surprises for future announcements :)
Now, back to work!

To be fair, I knew my last post was going to do some waves, but I honestly didn’t expect the prompt and efficient response it received. To make a long story short this time, a proper CS4 retail box is on its way to my office, so I’m happy again :)

I know some people might argue that I only received the treatment I got because of the noise I made, and there’s probably some truth there, but thinking about it, what’s wrong with that?
Even big corporations like Adobe, with all their complex CRM systems & procedures, have humans driving these systems, and these humans need to hear when their customers feel bad, in order to react and adapt.

And I have to say, the reaction has been excellent. So thank you all who reached out, and special kudos to Tracy for stepping up publicly and following up.

Finally, Adobe, I’m not sure how authorized I am for that, so I wouldn’t dare to call the following advices, but rather lessons learned I’ll also be taking for myself:

• Do something about that Tier-1 support. These people (and the systems that support them) are your front men, they need to be SUPER GOOD.
  I have quite a story with Adobe, I know how much people there love the products they make, and how much most of them feel very strongly about customer service, please don’t let all that being ruined at the front line.
• Fix that licensing system and make it simpler and more flexible. I know piracy is a real issue, and I know it’s easier said than done but as a matter of fact, the only people it affects are your paying customers, that just sucks.

Now, time to move on, I have a screencast to record :)

So, I was initially going to write a blog post to tell you about how great Adobe MAX was and reveal a small video preview of the upcoming V2 of Lovely Charts, but since I’ve just wasted another afternoon talking with Adobe’s customer service, I thought I’d do a little post about my experience with those guys instead.
This may not sound so relevant for this blog, but on the other end it’s also such a perfect example of how I DON’T WANT my own customers (you know, the ones that pay money for your products) to be treated that I guess there’s some relevance to be found anyway….

So, here’s my (long, sorry) story :

Read more »

And here comes “yet another über exciting milestone” in this whole adventure :)…
I’m pretty happy and proud to announce Lovely Charts will be present at Adobe MAX this year, as an “Emerging” sponsor/exhibitor! This will be my first time as an exhibitor, and the least I can say is that it is as scary as it is exciting!

So, what has decided me to jump in and why am doing this?

• It puts a milestone/deadline on my calendar. As I’ve already hinted at on this blog, Lovely Charts’ 2.0 is under heavy development, and I’m expecting it to be ready for early testing somewhere around the end of this quarter. So this was just perfect timing and a great opportunity to A. put a bit of healthy pressure on the development timeline in order to B. introduce the app’s preview to an audience of qualified professionals, and collect highly valuable early, live feedback on the upcoming version.
• It will be a great opportunity to meet users and customers in person, learn more about who they are, what they like and dislike, apologize for the bugs, thank existing customers for their support etc etc.
• At 4,500$ for the smallest sponsorship package + travel & accomodation, it’s definitely not cheap. However, I’m lucky enough to live in a place where a company like mine can benefit from substantial government help. Basically, the Walloon Export and Foreign Investment Agency (AWEX) should cover approximately half of the entire participation budget, making this a LOT more affordable. In fact, this shouldn’t really cost me any much more than if I had participated as a regular attendee.
• It’s another learning opportunity. As I’ve already said a couple of times, this whole Lovely Charts adventure is a fantastic big learning experience with tons of “first time moments” where I learn new things first hand. I’ve never been an exhibitor at any show (except one dog show with my great dane but that doesn’t count, does it?), so this will be a great opportunity to learn from the inside about how to run a booth, what to do, what to think about, what not to do, and more generally discover the impact of such a presence.
• It will be great fun :)… This kind of event is about networking above all, and MAX really brings together a fantastic crowd.
• A little extra visibility can’t hurt the business, can it? :)… I don’t know how many of the 5,000+ MAX attendees will have heard of Lovely Charts before, but this is definitely a chance to introduce my little product to a greatly qualified audience in person, and that’s great!

Voilà, in short, a summary of the reasons that motivate me. I’m very excited by this, and can’t wait to be there, looking forward to meet many of you in person !

Now, this is a decent update! I’ve just deployed what I consider a pretty cool 1.2 release, bringing you the following improvements:

• BPMN Libraries
  That’s something like 40 new symbols + 5 new connector types. I’m definitely not a BPMN expert, so please let me know if you see anything missing or unappropriate for real-world BPMN practice, there’s nothing like real users feedback! For the record, I’ve used the BPMN 1.2 standard as my reference, and organized symbols in 2 libraries: BPMN Events for all, well, events :), and BPMN General for the rest (Tasks, Artefacts, Gateways etc). If you feel this is not the right way to organize it, again, please let me know: jerome AT lovelycharts DOT com. Thanks!

  

• Image Import is now available to all! Everyone can now upload and use its own images/artwork within Lovely Charts! Check this post out to find out what this is about, or try it by yourself right away!
• Unlimited Imports: If you have a free account, you’ll be limited to a storage limit of 2Mb, but if you have a Premium account, you will be happy to hear I’ve lifted the storage cap on your Imports library… It’s now… Unlimited! :)

Kind of cool, no? :)

Title says it all :). So many good news this week make me think I really need to buy a lottery ticket.

Lovely Charts is nominated in the category “Best Bootstrapped Startup (less than 3 years old, EMEA)”, there’s only 2 days left to vote, don’t forget to vote! http://uk.techcrunch.com/2009/06/24/the-europas-best-bootstrapped-startup-less-than-3-years-old/

Yet another minorbutcool update today, focusing on export related issues:

• JPG export is now up to 4 times faster, thanks to Thibault’s fantastic work on optimizing the class responsible for encoding JPEGs for export. If you are into Flash/Flex development and don’t know Thibault’s website, you are missing on something, bookmark it quickly, this guy rocks !
  The cool thing with that speed upgrade, besides an obviously better user experience thanks to the faster response, is that it will allow me to consider supporting higher resolution exports, meaning higher quality output, lovely!
• I fixed a nasty bug that had insidiously slept in when I solved the infamous “orphan symbol issue“: edges of diagrams containing connections reaching outside symbols got cut off during export… Well, it’ no longer the case :)
• Rounded edges now look a lot nicer in exported images, check out the difference below
• PNG is now the default export format. If you don’t know what this means, essentially it means your images will be by default exported with a transparent background, implying you can use them on coloured, gradient and drawn backgrounds.
• Last but not least, a quick note to let you know Lovely Charts now requires Flash Player 10. This was essentially motivated by the perspective of offering the (much) faster JPG export mentioned above. It makes me slightly nervous to impose this, but my stats show that cc 80% of all my users have FP10 already anyway, the player installation is a pretty easy process, so I believe this shouldn’t be much of an issue anymay, but please let me know if this is an issue for you for whatever reason!

A quick post to let you now I’ve just released a “relatively minor yet cool” update to Lovely Charts, adding the following:

• Dashed border support for rectangular symbols. A lot of people missed that, and so did I:)… Rectangles with dashed borders notably come in pretty handy when you need to group a bunch of items visually.
• A 3D “cube” symbol will now show up in the “Basics” library. This is maybe slightly more futile, but I still for one certainly see use cases for it. If you like it, dislike it, want more 3D symbols, don’t care, let me know!

Updates are a bit slow lately, as I’ve been pretty intensely preparing my trip to San Francisco next week, it will be fun! Again, if you’re around the Bay Area next week and think we should meet, please drop me an email (jerome at lovelycharts)

Wow, that was easy.
Most readers of this blog or the newsletter already know this, but I’m working on an AIR version of Lovely Charts that will allow you to use Lovely Charts offline, save and open local files, etc etc. This is not a huuuuge effort, but it nevertheless requires some time to make sure it’s done properly, so unfortunately it’s not available yet :).
But meanwhile, if you are a regular Lovely Charts user, you may enjoy what Mozilla Prism has to offer, as it allows you to run any web applications (including Lovely Charts of course) directly from your desktop, without having to open your browser, type any url and s on. Just click on the desktop/launch bar/ start menu shortcut and the app will launch directly without all the browser chrome (that means more screen real estate!).

To turn Lovely Charts into a Prism app, follow these simple steps:

1. Install the Prism extension for Firefox, available here: http://prism.mozilla.com/started/
2. Navigate to Lovely Charts: http://my.lovelycharts.com
3. In Firefox’s Tools menu, pick “Convert website to application…”
4. Pick the options you want (shortcuts etc), Hit OK, and you are done!

I told you that was easy! Performances are awesome, keyboard shortcuts (copy, paste, undo etc) work perfectly, it’s not yet a full desktop app, but it sure does feel nice !

Prism is Windows only, but Mac users can use Fluid (http://fluidapp.com/) to achieve the same results. The good news I have for you guys is that I finally uploaded an icon to use with Fluid on the official Flickr group (thanks Peter for the tip) : http://www.flickr.com/photos/21383998@N07/3525448000/in/pool-fluid_icons