We’ve been busy. The screenshots reveal quite a bit the upcoming features but let me be explicit:
- Groups: shapes can be embedded in groups ad infinitum (this is an undoable action and copy/cut/paste works with groups as well, of course)
- Flowcharting: better support for standard flowcharting
- Arrows and connections: better support for databinding your stuff (i.e. data backend) to connections and related adorners
- Rotations: rotating shapes and groups (undoable action)
- Unity 2.0: Unity merges with the ObjectBuilder2. Nothing shacking here but it will simplify the underlying data exchange pipeline of G2.
- Library support: shapes, groups, layers, pages and whole diagrams can be saved to libraries and organized in categories. This features is based on an adapter mechanism, which means you can have libraries in a database backend or accessible via WCF etc.
- Alignments: aligning shapes is now possible. In conjunction with the snap & grid features this is particularly useful to have a nice layout.
- Snap & grid: everything has become snap-able.
- Linking: better support inside shapes to (hyper)link data; either diagram elements or data entities coming from your backend.
- XML: better support for XML import/export, extending the already very solid and beautiful data exchange pipeline of v1.0
- Theming of whole diagrams: apply a style to a complete diagram (cfr. Microsoft PowerPoint)
- Auto-connect shapes: auto-add or auto-connect shapes via the adjacent arrows appearing when hovering over shapes (cfr. Microsoft Visio)
- Bug fixes and squadrillions of little changes to make G2 better, faster, more useful, more business and data oriented, more beautiful.
No date fixed yet to release v2.0 though it’s pretty stable already now. So many things are going on these days… I sincerely hope to deliver a big headline one of these days regarding our future (and G2’s future in particular). In any case, I feel immensely proud about G2’s wonderful architecture and the breadth of applications it can support, the scope of features and the many high-tech subtleties which you will not find in any other diagramming package. It leaves the competition beyond the diagramming horizon.
Hello,
I’m watching your progress for some time now and the result looks great.
I just want to say something about groups: I know it make your life harder but I think you should consider making each element have more than one parent, this way the same element can be in several groups simultaneously.
It make sense in org. chat for matrix organization where an employee has more than one boss.
If you want to make your life easier I guess you can make something like PrimaryParent property that will be accessed by all the people who don’t need more than one parent.
Thank you,
Ido.
Ido, I remember you
You’ve got an interesting idea there, though somewhat unconventional. The implementation of groups easily allows the idea since it (and your PrimaryParent idea is similar to this) is all related to linking one shape to another. The ‘group’ is just another shape which moves and embraces the group children. I’m not sure I’m going to put the many-many group relationship by default in the API but you certainly have a point there. In whatever extension of the API there is always a compromise between flexibility, ease of use and scalability (performance too). In this sense, many features could be added but trying to wrap every possible usage and scenario would make G2 an horrible beast to integrate or to understand.
Thanks for your feedback.