This month on ScreenCastsOnline, I created a video tutorial on how to use the free, and open-source diagram tool, draw.io. I first told you about draw.io in 2016 and it’s still my go-to app for my diagramming needs. You may have seen my Live Show setup diagram where I put screenshots of all my app settings and embedded images of my hardware; that’s all created in draw.io. When Steve and I went to India with Don and Rally and more, I was really struggling how to understand the crazy itinerary, so I diagrammed out the entire trip in draw.io. That’s just a couple of examples of how I use draw.io.
I thought I was pretty good at draw.io from years of use, but you never really learn a tool until you have to teach others to use it. For example, I had completely missed the memo that draw.io now has dedicated desktop apps for the Mac, Windows, Linux and even Chrome OS. I used the dedicated app for the video and it was way better than using it through Chrome or Safari.
I learned more about how to use layers, how to create my own templates, more about working with shapes and connectors and even more about working with text in diagramming. I even learned why it’s available for free and how their business model supports such an awesome tool.
Sometimes creating video tutorials is a slog because the app misbehaves or it’s hard to learn or it doesn’t turn out to be as good as I hoped it would be when I started. draw.io was the exact opposite. It was probably the easiest video tutorial I’ve made to date because everything worked and worked well.
Don writes a newsletter when new episodes come out and I’d like to read you what he wrote about it. He’s not usually this excited about the tools I review!
Whilst reviewing and redoing the ScreenCastsOnline Post Production processes, I’ve been trying all sorts of diagrammatic tools to simplify and speed up the process of creating flow charts. I’ve used several of the typical tools and even some mind mapping ones, but the learning curve on all of them is just a bit too long, and they don’t seem to meld themselves to what I need to do easily.
Then Allison Sheridan rocks up with draw.io for this week’s ScreenCastsOnline tutorial — wonderful!
draw.io is a fully-featured and amazingly competent drawing tool, optimised for creating flow diagrams, but capable of much, much more. Even better, it’s free and open source. Now I’ll be able to take the outlines I ended up creating and translate them into proper workflow process diagrams.