Blog / Free Advice and Other Musings

Last week I posted about Graphical User Interface (GUI) prototyping tools and thought that I had discovered a pretty good list of reference points.

But then I remembered Gliffy, went back to the site and tried it out again. Suffice to say it is the best example of the movement from desktop applications that run on your local computer to web-based applications delivered through the browser. It’s Microsoft’s Visio drawing tool without the installation and license, stripped down and ready to go.

The funny thing is that going back to use Visio once you’ve used Gliffy illustrates how bloated Visio is and how its surplus of features muddles its usefulness. It’s hard to do things because there are so many things to do. Gliffy does 90 percent of the things I do with Visio and nothing more. If you need to draw anything – flowcharts, wireframes, diagrams, floorplans – you owe it to yourself to check it out.