Instaviz Review

One of the things professionals often need to do is break down projects into their simplest parts and see how everything fits together. Some call it mind mapping. Others call it making flowcharts, workflows, or concept maps. Whatever you call it, Instaviz lets you create them by simply sketching shapes and lines on the screen; the app then organizes everything on-the-fly and produces a professional end product.

If you've ever made a flowchart, using such software as Microsoft Visio, you know how complicated they can be. It's easy enough to create the nodes, but then you need to organize everything so that the chain of events is clear and evident. In other words, it can take a lot of time, trial, and error. Instaviz's goal is to take the hard work out of the process and make it more intuitive. To that end, it wholly succeeds.

Sketch a shape (oval, circle, rectangle, square, or diamond); Instaviz, much like with handwriting recognition software, will most often detect the shape and create a node on the screen. Sometimes it doesn't (once we drew a square and it thought it was a diamond), but it's easy enough to edit the shape after it appears. Tap the errant shape, tap the Edit button, and draw the shape again on top of the bad one; it transforms before your eyes with a cute little animation. Double tap the node (shape) to change many of its attributes (border, thickness, color, etc.) and the text you want it to encompass (font, color, the text itself).

Nodes are not infinitely customizable, however. You don't control the size, for instance; nodes only grow according to the text you type inside. You also cannot directly control their location. To connect nodes, just draw a line between them and arrowed lines will connect them; at this point, the nodes automatically reorder. The created layout should be ideal, but if it's not, there's not much you can do about it, unfortunately.

You can import others' graphs if you've loaded them onto the iPad, but only if they have the Graphiz GV format. Better, though, you can export to more standard file types: PDF, PNG, and even Visio's VDX. You can e-mail them, upload them to shared sites like box.net or MobileMe, or even upload them to your own website.

The app, overall, still has a few kinks, and some of its features are not immediately grasped (check the app description on iTunes for helpful hints; why there isn't a FAQ built into the app is beyond us), but we love how easily and quickly you can create a flowchart. If you find yourself needing to make these with regularity, Instaviz should save you time in the long run.