This landing page www.zenuml.com has been online for couple of months and I would appreciate any #landing-page-feedback .
This landing page https://www.zenuml.com has been online for couple of months and I would appreciate any #landing-page-feedback . What do you think this website/tool is for? Which button will you most likely click on the page?
Another thought and question - how did you establish if there is interest in the "UML" brand? I've been working on the fringes of "agile society" for a few years and UML was dismissed where simple whiteboard diagrams still thrive.
I know there are some places where formal diagramming is still required but have no idea how big a marketplace that represents.
I've long been a believer in text-based diagrams, using Graphivz manually before I discovered PlantUML (long before PlantUML was integrated into Doxygen).
There are three huge selling points of text-based diagramming which I think you can call out on your landing page:
Assuming your text comes from something in the source code repository, you can trivially see differences in diagrams which cannot be compared with the binary documents of a UML tool.
For most diagrams, it is the relationships and flow that matter, not the time wasted laying things out. "Spend your time designing, not drawing."
Separate diagrams go out of date. They become actively dangerous if people are misled, or a tax on development to maintain.
Oh, and I forgot to say, the gif is excellent as a hook to draw people in!
Sorry for replying late. I don't visit indiehackers very often. We are all working in agile or lean environment nowadays. I definitely have noticed the diminishing of UML. I believe there is still some interest for three simple reasons:
I am using it. In fact, I created it for myself at the beginning (7 years ago). Originally, it was called coloruml and used a different technology. I almost always need a sequence diagram for me to understand complex flow logic. To be honest, I don't find whiteboard works better in my use case, as I often have to insert some sub logic here and there.
I have a few friends using it. Mostly my previous colleagues. Many of them have used it for a few years and are still using it.
I keep getting feedback and feature request from users of ZenUML. It is pretty much only after ZenUML is launched in 2017.
In addition, PlantUML and websequencediagrams.com are making good money. I think there is a direct market (for text to UML) of about 1m per year. Given the growth of mermaid, the overall text to diagram market can be much bigger.
Btw, very good points to put on the landing page. However, I have disable the landing page, because it does not provide much information and the drop rate is around 40%. I am testing without it and am getting lower bouncing rate for the moment (fairly short time).
Even though it's a bit ugly, I like it a lot because the magic of it is in that coding gif. I love to see things be created as you type.
My feedback may or may not be relevant. I'm an intermediate developer (4-5 years), but I've never used a sequence diagram. Could you suggest use cases for developers and team leads? As a manager of developers, do I suggest this tool to my engineers? To do so, I'd want to know what it's used for and how to implement it. Is it more like a REPL for testing out new code, can it be applied to a whole repo, is it used to debug race conditions?
There are mainly two use cases: Pre-coding and Post-coding. Pre-coding, sequence diagram is used to express the logic/flow of execution or interaction. Similarly, post-coding, sequence diagram is used to visualise the main flow of existing code. I used it mainly for the second purpose. I am a team lead and working on a legacy project, so I have to quickly understand the execution flow and explain that to my team. Here are some examples you may get some feeling from - https://www.uml-diagrams.org/sequence-diagrams-examples.html .
It's prettier but has well-established competition with https://www.websequencediagrams.com/ as well as PlantUML (which I note you called out in your article https://modeling-languages.com/zenuml-drawing-sequence-diagram-easier-faster/)
Note that the URL is wrong on your Atlassian marketplace page, it says mdeling-language.com
but should be https://modeling-languages.com/
I assume you're aiming to do other document generation beyond sequence diagrams? Otherwise calling it zenUML is a bit cheeky ;-)
This goes to one advantage PlantUML has - it's integrated into the Doxygen documentation generator, which is where I use it with Markdown, and is a lot more flexible.
Thanks for spotting that error out. I have fixed it. Yes, we will at least include class diagram and flow diagram in the toolset.