Lovely Charts

Beware, great (and scary) news coming! The beta period is coming to an end, everything seems pretty much in place and we are now kind of ready to launch :)… Just a couple of last minute fine tuning touches to bring, and we’ll be fully available for all ! Stay tuned for the BIG announcement coming up very soon !

Meanwhile, I would like to use the opportunity given by this blog post to announce the addition of a new and sexy feature to Lovely Charts: Rich Text Formatting.

This is one of these features I’ve been pushing back on since the beginning for various reasons, amongts which notably the fact that I didn’t want to clutter the user interface with “futile” features. But user feedback, and realworld usage of the app have pretty much convinced us of the necessity and added value of such a feature, so we have been considering this for quite a while now, but it’s been far from trivial.

The top bar of the application holds all controls impacting the visual aspect of symbols and connections, and it’s been deliberately constrained to the strictly necessary.
But even then, in a “small but average” screen resolution such as 1024*768, the top bar pretty much uses all the available space, so adding extra controls would have obviously implied quite a bit of reorganization work…

Please take a look at the video below to see what solution we came up with and implemented, and let us know what you think, I personally think it’s pretty cool and efficient !

So, this whole Lovely Chart’s adventure definitely made me realise how bad I am at maintaining a blog. I can’t promess this will change, but I can certainly put this in my new year’s resolutions for 2009

I’ve had the great suprise yesterday of seeing Lovely Charts showcased in Adobe’s RIA Buzz newsletter, moreover in the very flattering RIAs that rock section, together with those amazing apps that are Scrapblog (double MAX 2008 award winner!) and the incredible Hobnox. That’s a great honor, thanks a lot to David and the rest of the editors for this über-fantastic christmas gift.

I would like to seize this opportunity to thank here all the bloggers and editors who published all these gorgeous reviews of Lovely Charts. I haven’t had the chance to thank you all at publication time, but be assured that I’ve seen most if not all of your articles, and they went straight to my heart. Thank you, thank you, thank you, you can’t imagine the good it does when working for months on such an ambitious project, a gazillion thanks !

But, what’s up now? Well, Lovely Charts is (almost) ready for prime time !

Why “almost”? Well, nothing big actually… I’m just waiting for my lovely accountants/advisor to give me a green light and finish validating the invoicing process, VAT rules implementation, etc. With christmas and new year coming up, I can’t really say with certainty when we’ll get that green light (I’ve actually been waiting for it for a while now^^), but I’m pretty confident it’s only a matter of days.

Christmas and New Year will, as always be busy periods, but I’m 99% sure though that the beta period will come to an end together with 2008. 2007 was development year, 2008 was testing and QA’s year, 2009 will be version 1’s year ! I expect to see V1 available in January 2009!

That being said, I wish you all in lovely christmas and a fantastic new year !

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!

First of all, let me apologize for the terrible lack of update this blog suffered from, let’s keep it short and just say summer was busy :)…
But anyway, Lovely Charts is definitely NOT dead… Actually, there has been quite some work accomplished on the upcoming Lovely Charts public beta over the last weeks, and I can today proudly announce it’s coming reaally soon.
Amongst the things that were done it’s worth mentioning the backend has been completely overhauled, notably in order to accomodate best a new, unforeseen (at least for V1) rather highly desirable, (set of) feature(s): diagram collaboration and versioning!
I know I said previously this wasn’t going to be implemented for V1, but, pretty much by accident, a recent code check of the previous backend architecture made me realize some of its weaknesses and the pretty upcoming need for a deep refactoring exercize if I ever wanted to implement things like collaboration and versioning, so I figured, why not do a one stone, two birds operation and implement both the new backend and these new front-end features! The result is absolutely very cool and I must admit I’m very impatient to see my first customers trying and out and start collaborating within the Lovely Charts environment, I can’t even believe I even thought of relasing a V1 without it

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:
Read more »

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