alt Hacker NewsI'm working on a new app for creating technical diagrams - https://vexlio.com. It's an area with some heavyweight incumbents (e.g. Visio, Lucid) but I think there's good opportunity here to differentiate in simplicity and overall experience. I'm still in the fairly early phase, and I suspect I haven't quite found the best match of features to customers yet.
From a dev perspective this area has a ton of super interesting algorithmic / math / data structure applications, and computational geometry has always been special to me. It's a lot of fun to work on.
If anyone here is interested in this as a user, I'd love for any feedback or comments, here or you can email me directly: [email protected].
Some pages the HN crowd might be interested in:
* https://vexlio.com/blog/making-diagrams-with-syntax-highligh... * https://vexlio.com/solutions/state-diagram-maker/ * https://vexlio.com/blog/speed-up-your-overleaf-workflow-fast...
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This looks really cool. An application I would use this for is to generate code for FPGAs, as finite state machines are very common.
This is an example, https://terostechnology.github.io/terosHDLdoc/docs/guides/st...
But it only outputs an SVG, and there are no tools (AFAIK) that go from diagram to code, which should easy to setup.
So I'd consider extending this to both generate code and read in code and make these nice interactive diagrams.
Actually right up my alley. I have many frustrations and reservations against the current offerings. Super excited to see a new player enter the field
Looks really good an seems intuitive (from just browsing the landing page). Will look more deeply.
Diagram-as-code option?
ie. a language syntax from which a diagram can be generated?
I find a lot of the time taken up in doing diagrams is laying them out properly and then having to rearrange them when it grows beyond a certain size.
This may,however, be an old-man Visio user problem that's been better solved by more recent options...
It looks like a pretty interesting product so I really hate to be that guy but the FAQ page at https://vexlio.com/faq/ straight up doesn't work (whenever I click any of the questions, it does nothing). Also, wanted to know if there was anything in the pipeline to get a Desktop application which would work offline. In several places in the enterprise world especially, I do feel there would be scope for that. I would definitely pay for a desktop version which worked offline for example.
Gave it a quick try and it's really nice, the aesthetic defaults are great. One thing I found unintuitive: I should be able to connect objects without having to select a new tool (the anchor points on hover should be clickable in any tool mode so I can connect objects on the fly).
Overall amazing though, will be using!
Super cool. Do you consider yourself to be a competitor with Mermaid?
What's your long term revenue model?
Enterprise licensing? Donation based? Hosting fees with value-add mark up?
In the off chance you haven't seen Bret Victor, your app reminds me of him, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGYGl_xxfXA
Visio and Lucid are trying to cover everything at the expense of practical convenience. Pick a lane and stick to it. Good luck!!!
Looks great! Your editor design is beautiful.
oh cool! I want to try this soon.
seamless latex integration is a winner for me!! will definitely spread the words for this
Unless you intend to be acquired by Overleaf I don't really see a future for your business to be honest.
Looks pretty great! The free tier also looks reasonable. The pricing on the other tiers isn't outrageous either if you use it consistently. Unfortunately, I likely find myself in the big gap between the free tier and the Basic plan. I can't justify yet another subscription that I use only a couple of times a year. That said, I would happily pay the $6 on the months that I use the service. Given the churn issues, I'm surprised more SaaS offerings don't work that way.