We're extremely excited for our friends over at Gliffy, the San Francisco–based software company, as they have just announced the release of the newest version of their popular Gliffy Confluence Plugin!

The Gliffy plugin lets Atlassian Confluence users add diagrams like flowcharts, wireframes, and UML diagrams directly to their wiki pages. But the 5.0 release isn’t your everyday upgrade. Over the past year, Gliffy completely rebuilt their plugin in HTML5 so now it is faster, smoother, and better integrated with Confluence than ever before.

According to Gliffy CEO Chris Kohlhardt, “Rewriting Gliffy in HTML5 is both the most challenging and most important project we've ever undertaken. This hard work will pay off for our customers by giving them a faster, more natural, and overall better user experience.”

HTML5 - faster and better all-around
The Gliffy plugin was originally built in Flash — at the time, the best technology available for complicated in-browser apps. But the web has evolved. The diversity of web-enabled devices, the introduction of HTML5, and the vast community building open-source code for HTML5 developers make supporting a totally Flash-based application feel kind of... old fashioned.

Gliffy’s developers are thrilled about the move to HTML5. According Kohlhardt, “HTML5 is a superior technology to Flash. Developers prefer it, our customers prefer it, and browsers support HTML5 better than Flash because it's an open web standard.”

Nifty new features
If you’ve used Gliffy before, never fear! It’s still the same Plugin you know and love. It just loads twice as fast and operates much more smoothly.

But since they were in there, anyway, the Gliffy engineers took the liberty of making a few improvements:

• The new color picker keeps track of your most recently used colors, so it’s easier to create beautiful diagrams with custom colors
• The revamped interface is lighter, cleaner, and more tightly integrated with the Confluence environment.
• Undo/redo have been amped up for more control, and now they have buttons on the toolbar!
• Snap-to-grid placement and drawing guides make it easy to create sharp, perfectly aligned diagrams.
• Smart copy and paste remember relative positioning, so you can create grid layouts with the push of a button.
• Keyboard shortcuts work much better in the new HTML5 app, even on Macs!

To learn more (and to download the app for yourself), check out the Gliffy Confluence Plugin 5.0.