Week Eight, Thing 15 : Online Applications and Tools

I'm exploring diagram software at Gliffy. I'm actually a big fan of all sorts of diagrams. Floorplans, flow-charts, graphs...There are all sorts of situations in which they're vastly more useful and clear than text alone.

I looked at the sites of both Gliffy and Mindomo and was more impressed with and interested in the examples Gliffy provided, so I've gotten myslef an account there. I've started trying to make a bathroom floorplan (When we bought our house five years ago, we planned to renovate our bathroom right away...) Unfortunately, I'm running into one of my pet peeves as an online learner: the tendency of services to promote their product, even though you're already right there, trying to use it. Don't just tell me what it can do, show me how to use the product. If you have additional products you want to sell me, or you want to keep me on your site and open to your advertisements (I'm addressing the Universe now; Gliffy is just the proximate cause of my irritation) help me right now. Don't tell me what you'll do for me later.

So, here I am, complaining, and trying to figure out how to rotate a (little drawing of a) toilet by 90 degrees...Ah, got it. Don't know what I did differently, but now I seem to be able to rotate things. I'll try to figure out how to set the room dimensions next.

Gliffy could be quite useful for space planning in a library. Moreover, the ability to make flowcharts could be extremely helpful in demonstrating workflows and proposing alternate workflow plans. To the degree that it can be used collaboratively, it seems it could have some of the same benefits as a wiki, but in a spatial medium, rather than an exclusively verbal one.