After 3 years of tinkering, experimenting, and late-night coding sessions, my isometric diagramming tool - Isoflow.io - has officially hit v3!

This project has been my creative outlet for simplifying how we explain complex systems. And now, it’s packed with new features to make designing and communicating ideas about business processes, information flows and IT networks more impactful.

AI Icon Generator: Use custom icons to represent components in your diagrams. Animation Builder: Bring your diagrams to life with step-by-step animated tours. Multi-Layered Views: Dive into details or zoom out for the big picture.

And yes, the editor is free to use, so give it a try and let me know what you think.

I took 6 months off to work on a side project and build a business out of it. It was one of the best things I've ever done. The job I got straight after was a direct result of my side project. Although the business did not thrive, I learnt a lot about what not to do as well. 6 months is a long time, and I felt too comfortable taking my time with things like trying to make the code perfect. If I were to do it all over again, I would have focussed more on other parts of the business like marketing and creating value than writing clean code.

> 6 months is a long time

Wondering how old you are. 6 months, to me, seems like nothing. I'm in my late 50s.

I took 6 months at 29 and it felt like a lot.

At 34, it still feels like a lot, but I also wouldn’t consider anything less than that a “break.”

I took off 18 months in my early 40s to study a few subjects that really do not have much economic value.

I would say it was ultimately a mistake. While I stormed out of the gate I got way too comfortable after a few months and ultimately lazy. The mistake was in thinking this wasn't going to happen for me. I would also say the subjective feeling of time was much too fast.

The upside though was that was my retirement basically and the realization that is not what I want from life is quite valuable.

Architecture diagrams should be easy to read and easy to maintain. This is exactly why I'm building https://isoflow.io

There’s definitely a market to take in this area since ms visio has basically fallen out of fashion. I’m using miro at the moment but it really falls short in terms of predefined shapes and pictos.

I'd be really interested to hear which icons you're missing. I'm actually just about to push an update that will add a few more icons to the library (i.e. queues, caches, DNS etc). Expect those over the next few hours. Will try to include any suggestions in the next release. Thanks for checking it out!

you can basically take inspirations (aka steal) from what ms visio offered. I haven't used it in a long time, but FWIR the picto & shape library was completely insane. Every single technical fields was there.

Wow this is so pretty.

If only it was not so difficult for our megacorp to give you money, process-wise.

To help spread some insights, could you go into a little detail about why?

I recall a friend of mine once saying his planned product would have a price-point that a typical mid-level exec could simply charge to their company credit card without being an eyelid. It looks like the isoflow prices are in that sort of range. I've always wondered if that model works (my friend went a different direction in the end).

Depends on the company. Processes vary, but for my former corporate employer, to give you an example, giving someone money in exchange for SaaS software needs 1) Vendor assessment 2) IT Risk Assessment 3) Privacy Assessment 4) Information Security Assessment 5) Proving ROI to budgeting people and getting their approval 6) Purchase order to a cost center.

Thanks for this, I suspected similar. Only yesterday I was thinking about the payment processes I've experienced in universities and councils in the UK. Every month would see a flurry of emails with invoices, purchase orders and cost centres flying around. Absolutely horrific.

Strong BeOS feeling to these icons! The product looks great!

Thankyou, more icons released just a few mins ago.

Good point. Would a JSON import / export feature help, so you can save and load your data locally without it ever having to touch the server?

Yes I think so. I have been using the blockdiag series of programs (nwdiag, seqdiag, rackdiag, etc) to keep it programmatic and version controlled, etc, so a json import/export feature would be great.

Good point. If this is a big concern, I'm happy to enable data export as JSON. Of course, you'd still need a visualiser that can read the data structure and display appropriate icons, but at least you'd have the raw data.

Thanks for the feedback cloudking, will add this to the feature request list.

Hi devonkim,

Thanks for checking out Isoflow, I'd love to know more about how you use diagrams in your work. The intention is to take Isoflow in the direction you're describing (i.e. being able to show different processes on top of the same diagram), so would really love to get your thoughts on what you think are the most important aspects. Please reach out to me through the 'contact' tab on Isoflow if you're up for discussing further. Thanks again for the feedback.

If your goal is for this to be used for engineering rather than just visual presentation, my advice is to support defining the actual system structure as text, and then use the UI to design views of that structure.

Bonus points if it consumes the text via git.

Thanks for the advice, I'm currently updating the data structure and will keep this in mind

Thanks Jeswin.

I'm using Mithril for the UI and Paperjs for the actual diagram editor.