After a long silence, we’re almost ready to launch Grafio 4. Some of the notable improvements to expect:

• iCloud support
• Standard file browsing interface
• Other cloud services supported in the Files app
• 3000+ free new icons
• Precision toolbar
• Library search
• Handwriting notes in each shape

There are a few important considerations:

• In order to become cloud-compliant, the document format had to be changed. Once you run Grafio 4 for the first time, it will automatically convert all of your existing projects to the new format. This means those files will not be supported by Grafio 3 apps (on other devices) anymore.
• All the converted existing documents will be saved in the device’s local storage as they were in Grafio 3. From then on, if you’d like to move them to the cloud, you need to do that by yourself and choose the folder(s) they are supposed to stay in the future.
• The user interface is deliberately the same as Grafio 3 in order to keep existing users comfortable. Don’t expect a flashy new outlook, most of the work has been done deep below the surface.

Why so long?

Good observers would ask – why did it take such a long time to introduce “standard” features such as cloud support. To make the long story short – we had to waste a big chunk of time rebuilding the data model in a few wrong formats. This happened since every new format introduced another insurmountable challenge – missing document thumbnails, third-party cloud service incompatibility, sluggish performance, just to name a few. So, after restarting the transition process so many times from scratch we finally hope it works as expected now.

Stay tuned!

A prototype is initial sample, model, or release of a product built to test a concept or idea or just to learning from. In software development, prototyping is often basic working model of product or system for demonstration purposes. The word itself derives from from Greek prototypon “a first or primitive form”, more info about the etymology of the word can be found here.

UI Prototyping

User Interface(UI) prototyping is analysis technique in which users are actively involved with their feedback to help the developers/designers to improve the system UI design and experience. Below we will describe the steps involved in that process and examine the logic behind every step in the process.

In the flowchart above you see the following steps for mentioned process:
Step 1. Determine the needs of your users and improve their experience by deciding how to evolve the essential parts of your UI.

Did you know that sport has a strong relationship to work and productivity?

A major study, commissioned by professional services recruitment and talent agency, Hudson, has evaluated the impact of sporting success and failure on the UK workplace. The research has been conducted by The Social Issues Research Centre, an independent, non-profit organisation founded to conduct research on social and lifestyle issues, monitor and assess global sociocultural trends and provide new insights on human behavior and social relations.

The results reveal that sport can have positive effect on boosting morale and improving mood, motivation and productivity in the working environment.

Great news, everybody! 11.11.2015 – It’s 11th November! This year Grafio joins China’s Online Shop-a-ton!

The largest online shopping day in China is already here and we are ready with an irresistible promo offer – just $3.99 !!! You don’t want to miss this awesome gift! Viva la revolucion! 🙂

网上购物革命！ *只限一天, 限時優惠至11/11 11:59pm

What is Ingress?

Ingress is location-based augmented reality game for iOS and Android. With interesting and long story behind it. During 2012 researchers in CERN discover that the Earth was seeded with “Exotic Matter”, or XM. This substance has been associated with the Shapers, a mysterious phenomenon or alien race which is neither described nor seen.

Тwo factions emerge after this, The Enlightened who believe that their actions will lead the humanity next chapter in it’s evolution and The Resistance who believes that it’s protecting the humanity from Shapers influence.

The game play consists of capturing “portals” at places of cultural significance or historical sites, for example: public art, landmarks, monuments, etc., by deploying resonators at neutral (white/gray) or friendly portals, or using Bursters to take down enemy portals.

How to play is out of the scope of this post, but if you choose to install the game you will be presented with short tutorial.

TL;DR: It’s giant game of Capture the Flag 🙂

Why I play Ingress?

Imagine that you are standing in front of a complex assignment to develop software from scratch. It is both creative and optimizational task. You have to decide how to structure your code, classes and libraries in order to achieve the desired functionality.

It is scientifically proven, that making diagrams helps you make such decisions. If you have visual plan of what you want to do, you will do it with less efforts. It turns out that Grafio is great toll for this kind of task. It lets you do your initial planning and also creates beautiful output, witch can be used in your documentation or even for presentation purposes. It gives you editable overview of your master plan and can cover different aspects of the software development process.

Class hierarchy

When it comes to class hierarchy things might be obvious – you have to create certain number of classes, each with certain properties. This could become really messy really fast. The more the number of classes and properties grows the more you need graphical representation, especially when you have complicated parent/child relations. You can describe your classes structure very easy – each class as shape with text with its children and their properties.

Views hierarchy

You will face similar problems when you start to design your user interface. Grafio is priceless tool for designing your user interface hierarchy. You can draw your entire user experience within one Grafio document. The diagram may include the number of windows and views, their sub views, user interface elements, user prompts and so on.

It’s that time of the year again!

Make your message extra special by designing your own Halloween postcard within minutes for free. Check out these funny little vector icons made in Grafio and unleash your imagination to surprise your friends. With Grafio most postcards are made within minutes and have that original feeling that you always wished for.

Go ahead and download the free template shown below and start creating. If you like more examples like this one you can download plenty from here.

About teaching with iPad

Since iPad came out it instantly changed many things in our lives. One of them is how we teach and learn. Today the iPad is one very powerful tool in every teacher’s arsenal. It allows you to have fully functional computer experience in your classroom. Both for you as a teacher and also for your students. There are hundreds of educational apps available, who could be helpful in a different tasks.

Checkout our new examples page and all the example diagrams you can download and open in Grafio.

The Story…

The examples page is not new as many of you know but it was missing from our site since we redesigned the site about 6 months ago. Here are some of your feedback regarding our missing page:

“I’ve been looking for #madewithgrafio files but didn’t found them”

“Where the h… are the examples files?”

“Developer is dead no updates on site…”