Diagram.ly 07/31/12
Design your video project workflow on Google Drive with Diagram.ly. Visualize the tiny details of your big picture.
A while back in our hack Create a Video Project Wiki we showed you an alternative to tangled email threads. The image in step 4 of that hack is a diagram example of project workflow:
This is fine except that I made this in Photoshop, which makes updating a pain-in-the-arse for non-Photoshop people.
That’s why it was cool to stumble upon Diagram.ly.
It’s a free online diagram drawing web application that enables to you to quickly draw node/edge graphs and distribute the result.
That’s awesome enough, but not necessarily unique. The diagramming web app Gliffy was the first in this space and probably better known.
No, what makes Diagram.ly great is its tight integration with Google Drive (formerly Google Docs) – and did I mention that it’s free?
Here’s the above image created in Diagram.ly:
And of course you can create other things in Diagram.ly that will illuminate project organization and workflow like:
- a key personnel org chart
- a network diagram
- interface wireframes (for interactive projects)
I will admit that navigating and using the UI takes some getting used to, but their helpful Q&A forum helped me get up to speed.
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2 Responses to this article
If I asked you to pick your top gripe with the UI and performing actions, what would you say?
When I uploaded a .jpg I could not find it in the media library on the left side of the UI. So I went to the Q&A forum for answers. I quickly found one and then returned back to the diagram.ly UI where I dragged and drop the image shape from the general toolbox into my canvas. I then right-clicked on the icon to reveal the ‘edit link’ setting. I pasted my .jpg URL in the field and then pressed OK. Nothing happened. It was only after I selected the image shape and then used the image icon in the top horizontal nav to paste in my .jpg URL, that I was able to have the image appear on my canvas. Should I have been able to map my .jpg to the image shape by right-clicking?