I stumbled upon Gliffy.com, a web-based Visio clone today, and was quite impressed.

The good:

- 100% web based
- Good layout
- Intuitive user interface
- Worked in Firefox 1.5.0.4 under OSX 10.4.7 without crashing once. Very few flash-based applets seem to be able to make that claim!
- Has all of the basic functionality to insure that casual users can easily throw away Visio.
- Awesome potential

The bad:

- No snap to grid
- Couldn't group text objects with other text objects for alignment
- Scrolling with my scroll-wheel was not an option
- Grouped objects aren't alignable once they are grouped.
- Doesn't have the ability to import Visio objects yet

All in all, I enjoyed this product. Here's a sample drawing that I was able to make in about 15 minutes using Gliffy. It's a high-level view of my Anycast DNS service. I'm excitedly looking forward to see how this app will grow.

What really excites me here, is the possibly of a Visio replacement for Linux that is actually useful. Dia is nice, but it doesn't really cut the mustard. OmniGraffle 4.5 is wonderful, but the OmniGroup only developes for the Apple platforms.

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