Dânesh Zaki

I spent a few minutes to do a test run of Gliffy, the online Visio-like tool. I thought that it was pretty easy to use and was good for making simple drawings and flowcharts. There is a fairly decent level of keyboard support (which I always look for in any tool) with the stand-out feature being the ability to move diagrams around using the arrow keys. There is no right click implementation yet (the Flash menu shows up on right click). There are features available to rotate shapes, add gradients and change line styles. A set of flowchart shapes are also available. Here is a flowchart that I’ve drawn using Gliffy.

One good thing that I noted was that Gliffy provides space on its server to store the images for sharing.

Bottomline: A good tool for creating basic diagrams and flowcharts. Addition of more shapes and options will make this a good alternative to Visio (in addition to the free factor).