To be honest, I haven’t been overly excited about desktop apps that are appearing in browsers. I still find many of them to be too sluggish to use on a daily basis. This is why I was stunned by the fluid demo I received from Gliffy last night at Stirr. Gliffy is basically an online version of Visio. If you think that designing a diagram within a web browser would give you a headache, I implore you to try Gliffy. You’ll be surprised how easy it is to forget that you’re using an online app.

The theory goes that about 5% of Visio users are power users. The other 95% just need to draw a damn box and label it. This is exactly the crowd Gliffy is going after. Built on Flash and OpenLaszIo, Gliffy provides all the functionality that most Visio users need on a daily basis.

After a brief initial load time, Gliffy runs smoothly in the browser without any hiccups. All the graphics are vector based, which means you can scale and transform to your heart’s content. It also has all the basics of diagramming: symbols, text, colors, and connectors. You can even fire off keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl-C for copy and Ctrl-V for paste, and Gliffy will respond just like any desktop app would.

A compelling feature is the ability to have a full revision history. Every time you save, Gliffy keeps track of all the changes, and, you can revisit any revision at any time. You can also add email addresses of people who you want to collaborate with, and, they will obtain access to the diagram.

After completing your diagram masterpiece, you can publish the diagram to the internet, which merely means you can link to a hosted image of your diagram at Gliffy. What’s nice about this is that the linked image is automatically updated whenever you save your diagram. No more editing diagrams in Visio, then renaming it, then uploading it to a server. Gliffy does this all automatically for you.

At this point, you must be asking, “What about portability? Am I stuck with using Gliffy forever?” Gliffy offers exporting to JPG, PNG, and SVG. If you need to further edit your diagram with a desktop program, make sure you export using SVG. I loaded the exported SVG file in Visio without a hitch:

Overall, Gliffy is definitely a polished product with a year of development underneath its belt. But, will people find it useful enough? I got a chance to speak with Clint Dickson, co-founder of Gliffy, and he said one of the early adopters of Gliffy are educators. Surprisingly enough, a tech-savvy teacher caught onto Gliffy, and saw it’s potential in the classroom where budget constraints prevent teachers from buying expensive diagramming tools like Visio. Free web services like Gliffy are providing cutting edge tools that allow students to learn and work on their projects not only at school, but at home too.

In addition to its free service, Gliffy plans on rolling out enterprise products with various levels of pricing.

Currently, Gliffy is seeing its user base steadily grow, with tons of new diagrams created each day. Look out for this one, because I have a sinking feeling in my stomach that Google is eyeing Gliffy for inclusion into their online office experience. Gliffy would make a perfect match alongside Writely and Spreadsheets.

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