Thursday, November 18, 2010

Fake generates fake

Lately I came across some strange informations.

It seems that a lot of production business (read: food, construction, etc) are trying to fool the buyer by cutting the quality of the product to cut the price.

For example you go to market and buy a salami. You get an “awesome” price for it and you are happy.

What you do not know is that what you bought is far away from a normal salami. It might be just water and some salami powder mixed together.

Putting aside the ethic and healthy aspects of this there is an economic aspect: we all got poorer because of that.

Even the producer which supposedly will get more profit will need to buy other products – that will be also faked - which somehow cancel his profit.

So fake generates fake.

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Make it simple

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." (Albert Einstein)

A lot of effort was spent by us in order to make Diagramo very simple.

We see a lot of reviews that highlighted that so I think we going the right direction.

A lot of people think that something simple is very simple to do but we found that it is much more difficult to make something simple then something complex.

We are trying to make Diagramo visually simple but also to offer the power of a desktop application.

Diagramo will be simple not simplistic. See here the difference.

Diagramo to SVG

We are working to be able to export the Diagramo/HTML5 generated diagram in many formats: svg, gif, jpg and png.

As any modern and decent (not IE) browser offers the option to save the canvas directly, it would have been very easy for us to just use that feature.

But because there are people that might need SVG and because IE does not have that feature, we decided to make an export to SVG.

What is nice about SVG is that once you have the SVG you can export in any format but not vice-versa.

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

HTML 5, Canvas and diagrams

This post could be named "How it started" but first it was HTML 5 and then the story unfolds.

All started back in March 2010 in Rome, Italy. I was there in a vacation with my lady and after a full day visiting interesting museums I wanted a piece of IT.

Grabbed my lady netbook and sneak out of the hotel apartment while she was in shower. Went down the stair to the hall, found a cozy couch and start browsing for something interesting.

I ended up on w3 site and from there to html 5 specs. Later on I found some interesting stuff you can do with HTML 5 (at canvasdemo) and ended up with the new tag canvas. I was amazed....it was like the first applet or first flash animation I saw...but hey WITHOUT any plugin.

Vacation ended and I went back to work. As I'm involved in many projects at the same time I had to make same basic diagrams to explain stuff to people I work with. Every time I had to use Visio or other desktop application.....until the apple bump my head and I said: "Wait a minute mister, why don't we have a browser diagram editor?"

From there it's only sweat, blood and hubris. I've made a small 'prototype' and later on Zack joined me to move this to 'proof of concept'. Later on two of my friends (Toni and Augustin) joined me to make a beta release of the application.

I'm personally embarrassed by how unpolished the application is at this point but I think it's good way to show people what HTML 5 is capable of. See diagramo.com

So give it a try and let us know how do you like it.