Another alternative is [PlantUML]( http://plantuml.com/activity-diagram-legacy ) which also has sequence, class ... diagrams
Stay the hell away. We had to use this at my last job and it drove people nuts.
Show HN: Code2flow – easy flowcharts with no mouse, no dragging and no hassle
61–70 of 88 posts
Re: Show HN: Code2flow – easy flowcharts with no mouse, no dragging and no hassle
#62If you are looking for a way to generate flowchart diagrams from a DSL description, the classic is Brian Kernighan's PIC: http://doc.cat-v.org/unix/v8/picmemo.pdf I am surprised at the amount of people that have never heard of it. It is probably already installed on your Unix system. There are several implementations with various improvements, such as https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~aplevich/dpic/
Maybe it's just me, but if it takes more than five minutes, to figure out how to go from the example chart to a png, perhaps there's a reason no-one knows it.
This took quite some time to dig up. In case anyone else was wondering, this produces a png (assuming foo.pic contains the example pic instructions): $ pic foo.pic | pic2graph > foo.png
Re: Show HN: Code2flow – easy flowcharts with no mouse, no dragging and no hassle
#63Seems very productive. Definitively worth trying. I've used graphviz for a bit, which is similar in mindset, and I can see myself using this, as a product. Now I think the pricing can be a little bit too much.
The free version is perfectly functional. :) Saas version will be affordable once it's done and once it has more features.
Current paid versions are more for bigger teams and companies requiring on premise solution.
Re: Show HN: Code2flow – easy flowcharts with no mouse, no dragging and no hassle
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hope your pricing model ($100-$300/month) is meant as a joke, and you're not really serious about it. It's extremely expensive. I can drag and drop text boxes in google docs just fine and it's not costing me a dime. The added productivity would be worth it if I was doing this all day long, but it's not the case (as a software engineer).
You're welcome to use the free trial version and I can assure you that the SaaS paid version will be very affordable. As for $100/$300 pricing, these are on premise business/enterprise versions meant to be used by bigger teams where data confidentiality is crucial.
I think the feedback you should get from that comment isn't that the price is too big, but that the pricing page may not be as clear as you think. I.e. you never intended that dev to pay 100$/month but he/she took it that way.
I think this is a great execution of a time consuming problem, good job!
Re: Show HN: Code2flow – easy flowcharts with no mouse, no dragging and no hassle
#65Seems very productive. Definitively worth trying. I've used graphviz for a bit, which is similar in mindset, and I can see myself using this, as a product. Now I think the pricing can be a little bit too much.
It's a huge price for interactive use, and I don't see much here that truly beats graphviz.
I prefer echo "digraph G {Hello->World}" | dot -Tpng >hello.png
For a stretched example http://www.graphviz.org/Gallery/gradient/cluster.html
Re: Show HN: Code2flow – easy flowcharts with no mouse, no dragging and no hassle
#66Don't listen to the feedback you're getting here about pricing.
It looks like you're used by people in healthcare, and they pay primarily for self-hosting.
My suggestion: replace "Data not confidential" with "HIPPA compliant" and double your prices. The free version works for 99% of people who just want to draw a flow-chart, and you charge reasonable prices to healthcare orgs that have to be extra careful because of regulations.
Re: Show HN: Code2flow – easy flowcharts with no mouse, no dragging and no hassle
#67Hey y'all, I've been working on this part time for a couple of years now. Recently it started getting more traffic so I thought I'd try sharing this project with hacker news. If it's useful to you, and the free app is good for most use cases, then hopefully it will reach wider audience. Cheers.
Hi, just wanted to say you've built something very nice! I just tried it out by re-making a fairly complex diagram and it took me like 10 minutes, including learning the syntax, very nice idea, done well!
I did notice one annoying bug, as I change and break the code sometimes, the editor just stops working and it's hard to tell what's happening (the loading indicator just stays there). Opening the dev tools, it appears you're not catching all errors when your parser (peg.js) fails.
SyntaxError: Expected ":" or [^\t\n\r :;[\]] but "\n" found.↵ at peg$buildStructuredError (https://code2flow.com/worker-flow.js:2:12222)↵ at Object.peg$parse [as parse] (https://code2flow.com/worker-flow.js:5:1413)↵ at exports.FlowWorker.onUpdate (https://code2flow.com/worker-flow.js:5:4410)↵ at callback (https://code2flow.com/worker-flow.js:2:8619)"Re: Show HN: Code2flow – easy flowcharts with no mouse, no dragging and no hassle
#68heh I knew them lines looked familiar digraph { "Hey" [shape=circle] "Welcome to graphiz" [shape=box] "You are new" [shape=diamond] "How are you" [shape=box] "It's super easy" [shape=box] "write plain english thats code like" [shape=box] "wanna do a condition" [shape=diamond] "editing"[shape=diamond] "Hey" -> "Welcome to graphiz" -> "You are new" "You are new" -> "It's super easy"[label=True] "You are new" -> "How ar…
Right. That depends on your target customers. You need to design a simple DSL that tailored for your customers and make them pay!
Re: Show HN: Code2flow – easy flowcharts with no mouse, no dragging and no hassle
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great feedback. Thank you. 2) Probably not good for nontechnical people but on the other hand most accurate for technical people. 3) Your point sounds reasonable. How would you describe the need of some companies need to host 100% of their data? Medical companies for example. This is the point I was trying to convey in the pricing. 4) Square is the new web 3.0 :)
I suppose it depends if you selling flowchart software to mainly technical people? Else if it is more like Excel users, you may want to go with 'as intuitive as Word' or something similiar. I'd just list 'fully secure' or 'encrypted' as one of the features, and not put it in the price plan at all. True enough on the Web 3.0 look! I'd recommend using one of the many colour palette tools on the Web though, just to get…
By full confidentiality I believe they mean that customers host the software themselves.
Re: Show HN: Code2flow – easy flowcharts with no mouse, no dragging and no hassle
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you use a handwritten parser for input?
After trying hand-written approach and later perl's Parse::RecDescent I ended up using peg.js ( http://pegjs.org ) parser generator. It was probably the most flexible and performant out of all the options I tried.
Peg.js is excellent. I'm working on a browser IDE for it to help people learn how to build programming languages.