Friendship ended with Lucid Chart; now draw.io is my best friend

🔗 Wednesday, 3 January 2024 • Cariad Eccleston • @cariad@gamedev.lgbt

It’s broken and they don’t care.

I’ve been spending this first week of the new year building a point-and-click adventure game; tentatively “The Untitled Astronaut Game” until something better comes along.

The first order of business was to build a puzzle dependency graph and figure out all the characters, locations and mechanics before even thinking about Godot or Procreate.

So I fired up Lucid Chart–which I’ve been using for years with a long project archive–and cracked on.

Fucked

It went well! I had a ton of fun coming up with the game’s story – until I came back from lunch and reloaded the graph.

The text was mangled.

I tried refreshing. I closed and re-opened Firefox. I opened the chart in Chrome.

The document was fucked.

To check if I’d just done something weird to this one chart, I dove into my archives and picked some old ones at random.

They were all fucked.

Technically unsupported

It was only at this point that I realised my ~£100/year to Lucid doesn’t get me any technical support. The best I could find in their help menu was a link to their peer-support forum.

So, I posted a cry for help and shared everything I knew. And within a day or so, I was told to try restarting and updating my browser. And then that reply was marked as the “answer” and my question was marked “resolved”.

But it’s not bleedin' resolved! My documents are broken in every browser! I tried sharing anonymous read-only links to my documents, and they were mangled on every computer. I tried exporting the documents to images–which, I hasten to mention, runs server-side–and they all rendered mangled.

Browser error, my arse.

draw.io ❤️

I tooted a call for recommendations, and I’m immensely grateful to Stephen and Neil for recommending draw.io!

It’s slick as heck, synchronises to my Dropbox account and–as much as I’d love to give them Lucid’s ~£100/year–it’s completely free. It’s not missing a single thing I need.

So long, Lucid

And so, I’ve spent today grabbing exports–rubbish exports–of all my Lucid documents so I can delete this useless account.

I can’t get a refund on the renewal I paid just a few weeks ago, but what’s the point in keeping an app I daren’t put any of my work into?

And after I clicked “Continue with account deletion”, check out this garbage fire they redirected me to.

Browser error, my arse.