
Show HN: Code2flow – easy flowcharts with no mouse, no dragging and no hassle - RushPL
https://code2flow.com
======
sedachv
If you are looking for a way to generate flowchart diagrams from a DSL
description, the classic is Brian Kernighan's PIC:
[http://doc.cat-v.org/unix/v8/picmemo.pdf](http://doc.cat-v.org/unix/v8/picmemo.pdf)

I am surprised at the amount of people that have never heard of it. It is
probably already installed on your Unix system. There are several
implementations with various improvements, such as
[https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~aplevich/dpic/](https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~aplevich/dpic/)

~~~
rhardih
Maybe it's just me, but if it takes more than five minutes, to figure out how
to go from the example chart to a png, perhaps there's a reason no-one knows
it.

~~~
rhardih
This took quite some time to dig up. In case anyone else was wondering, this
produces a png (assuming foo.pic contains the example pic instructions): $ pic
foo.pic | pic2graph > foo.png

------
hacker_9
1\. Smart. Plays to the strengths of the keyboard by using text input, vs
awkward dragging of elements with the mouse (especially with big graphs).

2\. Is 'pseudo code' the best description to use? Even the word 'code' can put
non-technical people off as they associate it with complexity.

3\. The pricing: hosting and support are good reasons to pay, but 'full
confidentiality'? It seems you are going out of your way to make the product
insecure because the user is not paying. It comes across as a bit money-
grabbing.

4\. The gif on the front page works well to show off the product simplicity in
an intuitive way. My only thoughts is the flowchart could do with looking a
bit more 'web 2.0'; SVG elements so you can have rounded corners, shadow
effects, colours that work together, arrows that look more professional etc.

~~~
RushPL
Great feedback. Thank you. 2) Probably not good for nontechnical people but on
the other hand most accurate for technical people. 3) Your point sounds
reasonable. How would you describe the need of some companies need to host
100% of their data? Medical companies for example. This is the point I was
trying to convey in the pricing. 4) Square is the new web 3.0 :)

~~~
hacker_9
I suppose it depends if you selling flowchart software to mainly technical
people? Else if it is more like Excel users, you may want to go with 'as
intuitive as Word' or something similiar.

I'd just list 'fully secure' or 'encrypted' as one of the features, and not
put it in the price plan at all.

True enough on the Web 3.0 look! I'd recommend using one of the many colour
palette tools on the Web though, just to get a more natural softer look
between the various hues.

~~~
perfmode
By full confidentiality I believe they mean that customers host the software
themselves.

~~~
hacker_9
That is already made clear in a separate bullet point though.

------
RushPL
Hey y'all, I've been working on this part time for a couple of years now.
Recently it started getting more traffic so I thought I'd try sharing this
project with hacker news. If it's useful to you, and the free app is good for
most use cases, then hopefully it will reach wider audience. Cheers.

~~~
Fiahil
I hope your pricing model ($100-$300/month) is meant as a joke, and you're not
really serious about it. It's extremely expensive. I can drag and drop text
boxes in google docs just fine and it's not costing me a dime. The added
productivity would be worth it if I was doing this all day long, but it's not
the case (as a software engineer).

~~~
RushPL
You're welcome to use the free trial version and I can assure you that the
SaaS paid version will be very affordable.

As for $100/$300 pricing, these are on premise business/enterprise versions
meant to be used by bigger teams where data confidentiality is crucial.

~~~
d0m
I think the feedback you should get from that comment isn't that the price is
too big, but that the pricing page may not be as clear as you think. I.e. you
never intended that dev to pay 100$/month but he/she took it that way.

I think this is a great execution of a time consuming problem, good job!

------
ephemeris
heh I knew them lines looked familiar

    
    
        digraph  {
                "Hey" [shape=circle]
                "Welcome to graphiz" [shape=box]
                "You are new" [shape=diamond]
                "How are you" [shape=box]
                "It's super easy" [shape=box]
                "write plain english thats code like" [shape=box]
                "wanna do a condition" [shape=diamond]
                "editing"[shape=diamond]
        
                "Hey" -> "Welcome to graphiz" -> "You are new"
                "You are new" -> "It's super easy"[label=True]
                "You are new" -> "How are you"[label=False]
                "It's super easy" -> "write plain english thats code like" -> "wanna do a condition"
                "wanna do a condition" -> "Just write an if"[label=True]
                "wanna do a condition" -> "editing"[label=False]
                "Just write an if" -> "editing"
                "editing" -> "How are you"[label=False]
                "editing" -> "see stuff update via entr"[label=True]
                "see stuff update via entr" -> "editing"
                "How are you" -> "goodbye"
        }
    

Now I want to study up on parsing to build my own ast to dot generator

~~~
eosrei
Yes! I just made a massive digraph last week with
[http://graphviz.org/](http://graphviz.org/) Render above to PNG with:

dot above.gv -Tpng -oout.png

------
mmgutz
Another alternative is [PlantUML]([http://plantuml.com/activity-diagram-
legacy](http://plantuml.com/activity-diagram-legacy)) which also has sequence,
class ... diagrams

~~~
jbob2000
Stay the hell away. We had to use this at my last job and it drove people
nuts.

~~~
mmgutz
Kind of surprised. My team uses it and the fact that it is all text driven
(works with git) has them all sold. We mostly use class and sequence diagrams.

------
WhitneyLand
How do you arrive at the pricing model for this? $100 per month $300 per
month? How is that justified?

Also how do you win against competitors? Is this project something that
couldn't be duplicated in a week or so? No disrespect intended, maybe there is
more to it that I'm seeing.

~~~
RushPL
Let me start by saying that the free trial is perfectly functional and you can
use the product totally for free and you are welcome to!

The pricing for individuals is gonna be published soon along with the SaaS
product. It's probably gonna be something like $10/mo but still couple more
features need to be built to justify that (like permanent links which content
can be edited)

As for the $100/mo - we do have business/enterprise customers who find lots of
value in it. I guess the price has been initially verified by the market so
should I justify it?

I guess I can justify the price by saying that the project has taken numerous
hours of engineering, testing and experimenting. I think this is natural in
pricing models that bigger customers pay more.

If you can do the same in a week than good for you.

Peace and take care :)

~~~
RushPL
Also, if this product can save more than 3 engineering hours per month for
your whole company than I'd say the self-hosted product is totally worth it.
Simple math. :)

~~~
bbcbasic
If only companies thought that way. It's all about budgets.

------
endergen
I've been playing with a real time visualization of various graph
visualizations that have nice text DSLs. Current progress is open source and
includes an Atom Package for editing and visualizing results on the fly, as
well as a command line tool for generating SVGso from the textual
representations.

[https://atom.io/packages/diagrams](https://atom.io/packages/diagrams)

and

[https://www.npmjs.com/package/diagrams](https://www.npmjs.com/package/diagrams)

Desktop oriented for offline use.

~~~
otahi
Looks great!

I think StackEdit is another tool to create flowcharts and sequence diagrams.

[https://stackedit.io/editor](https://stackedit.io/editor)

[https://github.com/benweet/stackedit/blob/master/public/res/...](https://github.com/benweet/stackedit/blob/master/public/res/WELCOME.md#uml-
diagrams)

We can create a flow chart with following markdown.

```flow

st=>start

e=>end

st->e

```

~~~
endergen
This is awesome!

------
ontoillogical
Don't listen to the feedback you're getting here about pricing.

It looks like you're used by people in healthcare, and they pay primarily for
self-hosting.

My suggestion: replace "Data not confidential" with "HIPPA compliant" and
double your prices. The free version works for 99% of people who just want to
draw a flow-chart, and you charge reasonable prices to healthcare orgs that
have to be extra careful because of regulations.

~~~
jv22222
I completely agree.

Start high and work your way down until you get consistent conversion ratios
that match up with your personal goals.

OR start low and then keep increasing the price until you hit a conversion
wall.

Both ways work!

This is an amazing read on the subject:

[https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/saas_pric...](https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/saas_pricing)

------
daw___
This is just great. Are you planning to introduce an "Export as GraphML [0]"
function? My ideal workflow would be to use code2flow to quickly build up the
core of a flowchart, and then importing it into a full blown flowchart editor
like yEd for the fine tuning.

[0] GraphML
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GraphML](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GraphML)

~~~
RushPL
Interesting idea, I'll definitely look into it and let you know. :)

------
notheguyouthink
This is awesome! Any chance it can somehow output to a text based chart?

This is basically what has been preventing me from using
[https://monodraw.helftone.com/](https://monodraw.helftone.com/) \- i didn't
want to draw simple flowcharts. If this can output text for a sane price,
you've got a customer!

(though, i would prefer an offline app, fwiw)

~~~
RushPL
By text-based do you mean ascii-art? Right now you can output graphics
alongside with text to PNG, PDF or SVG -
[https://code2flow.com/8qRgzO.code.png](https://code2flow.com/8qRgzO.code.png)
[https://code2flow.com/8qRgzO.code.pdf](https://code2flow.com/8qRgzO.code.pdf)
[https://code2flow.com/8qRgzO.code.svg](https://code2flow.com/8qRgzO.code.svg)

~~~
notheguyouthink
Yea i meant Ascii art - Monodraw is an amazing program, and as much as i
_want_ to buy it, i haven't because i don't want to _draw_ the flow charts.

Your solution is something i've literally talked about here before, so it's
welcome to see! But i still need/want ascii. I suppose i don't _need_ it.. i
just like being able to view things in CLI/etc.

------
mthoms
Cool tool. How does this compare to
[http://flowchart.js.org](http://flowchart.js.org) ?

~~~
simple10
After trying both, Code2flow is much easier to use for quick diagrams but not
as feature rich. Flowchart.js has a bit of a learning curve IMO but much more
powerful. Code2flow has free and paid options. Flowchart.js open source.

------
zokier
I like the concept! But there is one thing that seems really weird to me:
Edges connecting to other edges instead of nodes. I don't recall seeing that
before, at least not very often. I suppose there might be some cases where it
helps the layout but I still would make it optional and maybe even default
off.

~~~
RushPL
Hey, I'm not sure what you mean but if you can post a link to a broken
flowchart I could try fixing it.

~~~
alcari
The front page demo does it with the while loop.

~~~
RushPL
I see, this arguably makes such loops easier to follow. I'll look into making
it optional though.

~~~
philsnow
I've seen this before but the edges join together cleanly: one of the edges
"merges" (like a freeway on-ramp) with the other edge.

In the demo on the front page, there's clearly a pseudo-node that the edges
stop at, and it's jarring.

edit: this thing:
[http://snap.philsnow.io/2016-11-18T11-19-57.mpfpkk55hj0dunqf...](http://snap.philsnow.io/2016-11-18T11-19-57.mpfpkk55hj0dunqfi8dn.png)

~~~
RushPL
Indeed, it does look a bit weird in that case. On the other hand check out
this flowchart [https://code2flow.com/KdNVeJ](https://code2flow.com/KdNVeJ) \-
the same thing looks very clear here.

------
partycoder
Seems very productive. Definitively worth trying.

I've used graphviz for a bit, which is similar in mindset, and I can see
myself using this, as a product.

Now I think the pricing can be a little bit too much.

~~~
jxy
It's a huge price for interactive use, and I don't see much here that truly
beats graphviz.

I prefer echo "digraph G {Hello->World}" | dot -Tpng >hello.png

For a stretched example
[http://www.graphviz.org/Gallery/gradient/cluster.html](http://www.graphviz.org/Gallery/gradient/cluster.html)

~~~
eosrei
These amazing Graphviz examples by AT&T research are linked in the docs, but
now only on archive.org:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20130514141942/http://www2.resea...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130514141942/http://www2.research.att.com/~yifanhu/GALLERY/GRAPHS/index.html)

------
gerry_shaw
Cool to see this on HN. I've been using for at least a year to help document
some specific use cases in our code. I appreciate the stable URLs that make
this possible.

------
achr2
I don't know what you are using as a graph layout engine, but if it can export
to a few standard layout formats (dot file, GraphML etc.) I would use this all
the time.

------
bmh100
I run a small business, and for $3,600/year (unbranded), I will easily choose
to stay with Inkscape. I understand the importance of branding, so "white
label" is a necessity. My use case is to document process flow in systems,
which remain unchanged for months at a time.

Contact me if you want to talk about a pricing model that would make sense for
my market segment. Maybe per-chart pricing.

~~~
RushPL
I just wrote you an email but I'm replying here as well. If you just need to
make some flowcharts they will not have a code2flow stamp in any of the
pricing tiers. Maybe except free trial, but it does not watermark the output
either yet. You are welcome to use the free trial until we have a paid SaaS or
buy the basic self-hosted version.

The enterprise version is for companies embedding code2flow in their own
products.

Many thanks!

~~~
Raphmedia
Add it on your pricing grid. "No watermark" could be enough for some people to
switch over from free to paid.

------
Procrastes
Nicely Done!

I played with a simple OAuth2 flow and it worked great. I'm going to see about
using it for all of our documentation.

Business is probably too steep for us and we wouldn't want on-prem anyway. A
Saas Pro plan might be interesting if it's affordable.

Note: Download to PDF failed silently for me. Printing worked great. I haven't
tested SVG or PNG yet.

~~~
RushPL
I'm glad you like it. I just deployed a fix that should address the download
problem. Cheers.

------
z3t4
This is very cool! I would however just want to draw it all by hand, like a
paint tool. Also it could look a bit better.

~~~
teleclimber
Check out drawexpress. It works best with a stylus. I use it on my Lenovo yoga
book and it's brilliant. I can put something that I have in my head onto a
neat looking graph amazingly fast.

------
karmelapple
Great idea!

My brain jumps from the code being psuedocode to instead being actual Swift,
and the chart would be displayed in the output section of an Xcode playground.

Anyone know if something like that exists? Or if it may be easy to port an
idea like this to inside a Playground?

------
siliconc0w
I actually built like the same tool for internal use at the last company I
worked for.

------
staticautomatic
Oh man this looks really neat. Thanks for building it.

------
Meph504
I love your idea, and I think it seems like a nice implementation. But feel
your price point will push this well beyond its value.

~~~
RushPL
There is Sass version in the works that will be probably $10/mo - still
working on the features and billing.

------
ecesena
Not really sure why, but have issues seeing the screencast.gif on Safari
10.0.1 (11602.2.14.0.7), El Capitan.

------
Davidp00
Looks cool!

Can you share a really complex flowchart that uses most of the options?

~~~
RushPL
I don't have anything large at hand that I can share. Here is a small real-
world use case [https://code2flow.com/wclEvF](https://code2flow.com/wclEvF) \-
and this is another
[https://code2flow.com/KdNVeJ](https://code2flow.com/KdNVeJ) In the latter
example, please note that "Update failed: flash error" generates only one node
in the flowchart.

The most complex flowcharts were created by customers and testers but I don't
want to expose their data. They have hundreds of lines of code resulting in
huge diagrams.

------
rprameshwor
This is beautiful. Thank you !!

------
bbcbasic
What would be cool is to paste in actual code e.g. Java and produce a
flowchart based on some conventions e.g. convert camel case to sentences.

