Gliffy: Light bulb moment - Creating an arc

[Patrick O_Connell]

Hey everyone,

I am frequently quite irritated with Gliffy. No, scratch that. Infuriated. Profoundly frustrated. It's almost, but not quite, what it could be.

One of the its key failings, for me, is not being able to:

• Draw just a part of a circle: an arc,
• Have an arrow on one end of it, and
• Have more control of the curve, than Gliffy's "I must go around things if I can" and similar algoriths.

And of late, my boss has me working on these "big-picture" diagrams. It's gotten to where we need curved arrows.

So, here's the brain-flash I had yesterday: use small white shapes as anchor points for the connectors. Obviously, if your background is not white, and it's another solid colour, you'd use that colour instead. In this case, I used boxes.

In this first image, I've temporarily changed the color of the boxes to a dark blue, to highlight them:

And in this second image, they're white:

So, this achieves the desired effect. It's a poor stand-in for a full Bezier curve tool, or the same for connectors (or both), but it's something.

Hopefully this is of use to someone else.

Best,
Pat O'Connell
Technical Writer
MindGeek Montreal

[Samie Kaufman - Your Gal at Gliffy]

Hi Patrick!

Wanted to let you know that we totally hear your feedback about wanting a cleaner way to draw curves.

I poked around a little to try to figure out a better way to do this, too. Would it be easier for you to start with a straight line (not connected to any anchor points) and change the line type to the curved, last option? From there, I was able to adjust the middle point of the line to create an arrow that might work for your diagram.

Using your workaround might be just as fast, but I wanted to share in case this saves you any extra time! Hope this helps a little & let me know if you have any qs. 👋

Samie