Cacoo blog

The New Year is right around the corner and we would like to thank you all for using and supporting Cacoo during this year.

We’ve heard that a lot of you have already sent and received cards using Cacoo Greetings. If you haven’t done so yet, send warm wishes to your friends and family.

1. Go to Cacoo page on Facebook. Select Cacoo Greeting in the left menu. Press “Create a card” button.

2. Allow Cacoo to access your information.

3. If you already have a Cacoo account, connect to the existing account.

4. Select friends you’d like to send a card.

5. Select a card.

6. Customize the card on Cacoo.

7. Set when you want to send the card.

Wishing everyone a very happy holiday season!

The Cacoo Team

Hi Cacoo fans!

Among the emails we receive to our Support account, “Sign in” issue has been the number one.  We have improved the Sign in panel several times to make it easier for all users.

Currently there are 4 sections in the Sign in panel.

A. Sign in with other services’s account information

If you have signed up using other service’s account information, you don’t need to enter your email address and password to sign in to Cacoo.   Simply clicking one of the button in Sign in panel that you used to sign up will let you sign in to Cacoo.

If you have a Cacoo account and if you want to connect other services to your account, press one of these buttons and click “Connect to existing Cacoo account” tab on the directed page. Once your account has been connected to other services, you’ll see them as connected on your Settings page.

B. Sign in with your email address and password

As orthodox as other services, you can sign in with your email address and password. Please note that the email and password fields are case sensitive. Please make sure to enter it exactly how you entered when you signed up.

C. Forgot your password?

If you don’t remember your password, please click this link. You’ll receive an email to reset your password after you enter your email address in the following page.

D. Sign up

This is where you can get your free account if you don’t have one yet.

Summary:

When you cannot sign in, don’t panic. We are always here to help you. Please feel free to contact us from here. Also, if you have any suggestions to improve Cacoo’s sign in steps, please let us hear!

Since we’ve introduced the Team Plan a while ago, it’s been used by the numbers of groups, such as a small retail store, a group of event organizers, a large firm and university research teams.

The best things about the Team Plan are that it’s easier to manage team members and easier to keep tracks of your payments.  For example, for a project team with 10 members, purchasing a Basic Team plan is not just a better deal compared to 10 Plus plans, but the team will have only one, instead of 10, invoices to process.

Managing team is very easy.

Once you’ve upgraded your plan to the Team Plan, you’ll have a link for this “Manage Team” page under Settings.

On this “Manage Team” page, you can:
A. Change the name of your team
B. Invite members
C. Check member’s status – one of the following:

• Waiting response: until the member accepts to join the team
• Joined the team: member accepted to join the team

D. Role – one of the following and administrators can change the members’ role.

• Administrator(Owner)
• Administrator
• User

E. Action

• Cancel Invitation: to cancel the invitation for members not joined the team yet
• Remove from Team: to remove the member from the team

If you use Cacoo at work or at school, recommend Cacoo to your colleagues and friends so that you can benefit from the Team Plan.

The features for the Team and Plus (individual) users are almost the same at this point but we are planning to add more features for Team plan.  If you have any request for the Team Plan, please feel free to contact us from here.

Hi. This is Minako.

I’d like to introduce tips that will be very useful for creating flow charts on Cacoo.

Please allow me to explain it step by step.

■ Use Copy/paste style to clone colors
Click “Copy/paste style” on the toolbar. First select the object that you want to copy the style from. Then click the object that you want to have the same style as the copied one. Color and line settings will be cloned.

■ Enter text in rectangle and rotate
Rotated rectangle can be easily aligned to the left end of title. (It looks nicer when the text is aligned in the center/middle.)

■ Add rows
Add rectangle stencil from the Basic category and adjust its size. Adjusting sizes are also easy as it aligns with other objects.

■ Group objects.
Select objects while holding Shift key, then choose “Group” from the right-click menu to group them up. It’ll make it easy to duplicate rows.

■ Adjust the heights of grouped objects by stretching vertically.
As the rows are grouped up, adjusting heights of the objects can be done without messing up the text formats.

■ Edit text without ungrouping.
Even when the objects are grouped, the text in each object can be edited. The selected object will be specified by the thicker blue line. You can edit the inside of this line.

■ Connect objects in the flow chart.
Select the line type from “Select Connector” on the toolbar. I’ve selected “Straight” this time.

■ Change the end of the connector to arrow on the Inspector panel.

■ Double click on the line to add controlling points, and make the connector to be a broken line.
When you double click on the line, a controlling point will be added. By moving this point, you can make the connector to be a desired shape. It’s easy as it snaps so that the line will be straight.

■ Change the line type
On the Inspector panel, you can change the line type, such as dotted and dashed.

I hope these tips will help when you create a flow chart.
Grouping and snapping come very handy for flow charts.

Please draw a varieties of diagrams with these tips!

Hello.

I believe most of you use the Stencil panel when you draw diagrams on Cacoo. I’m going to introduce the basic functionalities of the Stencil panel. You might find tips you might not noticed before, so please check them out.

1. Recently used categories
When you click the category name label area, you can show up to 5 recently used stencil categories. You can access frequently used stencils from here!

2. Division
When you double click the border line that divides the Stencil panel, you can expand the lower part. Most of the times, you only need the 5 categories that you’ve used recently, which are accessible from the category name label area. To view more contents of the stencil category, please try to expand the lower half of the Stencil panel.

3. Reload
When you click Reload button on the title bar, the lists of stencils will be updated. You might not use this button often, yet for example, when you click this button while you are creating a stencil, the changes will be updated. This will be very useful for stencil creators as you can preview the stencils.
(For more details about creating your own stencils, please check this and this blog posts.)

4. Show/Hide the Stencil panel
If your diagram is large and occupying the whole viewable area, the Stencil panel can be annoying. On Cacoo, you can show or hide panels in 3 different ways.

- Stencil panel button on toolbar
This will be the most common way. The Stencil panel shows up or hides as you press the button on toolbar.

- Tab key
As this was introduced in our recent post, you can show/hide panels with Tab key. I recommend this because you can show/hide panels by just hitting one key! Please note that hitting Tab key shows/hides not just the Stencil panel but all panels on the editor.

- Title bar
Double clicking title bar of the Stencil panel hides the rest of the panel. You can restore the panel by double clicking the title bar again.

Have you known all of these tips?

I believe the convenience of the Stencil panel equals to the easiness of drawing and the usability of Cacoo, so I’ll keep to put more effort into improving the Stencil panel.
We’d love to hear your comments and recommends to make the Stencil panel better. Please feel free to send in your feedback.

Bye for now.

Hi!

How are you all?
Have you noticed that you can use shortcut keys on the Cacoo editor? If you haven’t used it before, please see the image below. This panel will be shown when you click Help button on the toolbar.

Some of the shortcut keys I often use are:

• TAB (Switch on/off all panels)
• t （New text）
• Shift + arrow (Move by 10px)
• Shift + resize (Resize while keeping the aspect ratio)
• when editing an image：Alt + drag (Crone the selected area)

Including shortcut keys, we are going to add more functionalities so that you can draw diagrams easily. If you have any requests, please post them on UserVoice.

I’m going to show how you can create stencils without using other drawing tools.

Please watch the following video first:

Basic steps, such as saving the diagram as “Stencil”, are the same as what you’ve seen on “How to Create a Stencil” tutorial video.
In this way, you don’t need to export as SVG from other tool and import into Cacoo. It will be easier for heavy Cacoo users as all procedure of creating stencils can be done on Cacoo.

Expressing details will not be as good as drawing on Illustrator but with your creativity and ingenuity, you’ll be able to draw more complicated drawings on Cacoo.
I’ve created a camera stencil on Cacoo this time. I believe that it’s good enough for using as an icon on websites.

Illustrator is not a must have. You can create attractive stencils using Cacoo only. Enjoy!

Hi everyone,

We hope you are enjoying the sharing feature of Cacoo now.

As I’ve written on my last post, let’s step up to the Shared Folder. The Shared Folder is similar to sharing diagrams but all diagrams in the Shared Folder are shared with the sharers of the folder, which means you don’t need to invite your friends, co-workers and clients for each diagram any more.

On the list page, the first page you see after you sign in Cacoo, you see “Shared Folder” column on the left. You can add a new Shared Folder by pressing the “+” button.

You’ll be asked to enter the name of the folder.

After you decide the name, the Share panel will be shown. Add users you want to share diagrams with on this panel.

If you need to add or delete users, you can edit sharers from the toolbar.

In addition to ordinary diagrams, you can put your own stencils into the Shared Folder. Sharers will be able to use your stencils, which is located under “User Defined Stencil” category in their Stencil panels. If you have created your own stencils, such as your company logo, put them in the Shared folders so that your colleagues can start using them.

Free users are limited to create only 1 Shared Folder with up to 3 sharers. To use more Shared Folders with more people, please consider upgrading to Plus plan and Team plan!

Hi. My name is Agata.

Cacoo can be used for a mockup to improve an existing website.

Seeing is believing – please check the video below first.

Two important things in this video are:

Tip 1. Copy a part of image to create a new component

A new component (a new tab, in this video) has been created by copying a part of the image. After double clicking the image, Alt + dragging clones the area dragged.

Tip 2. Masking the unnecessary area

Unwanted components can be masked by covering the area with a stencil. Eyedropper feature is useful to make a stencil in same color and graduation as the background. Also, cloned images, as shown in Tip 1, can be used to cover the unwanted components, too.

The video only shows how to create the frame of the Blog page. The body of the page can be a roughly created wireframe or a collection of images from other websites for the final image of the page.

Cacoo is good not only for creating wireframes of new sites but for improving UI of the existing sites, and can be used free of charge♥

Hi! My name is Keisuke Okafuji and I’m responsible for HTML/CSS of Cacoo.

We put a link to Cacoo recommendation form on the top page a couple months ago. Have you recommended Cacoo and got 5 extra free sheets?

You can improve the efficiency when you share and collaborate on your diagrams with your friends and coworkers, so start using Cacoo with them.

At the same time we started to have this recommendation page, we created a new video for the recommended people. This video is intended to solve their first question, “What can I do on Cacoo?”

As this video can be accessed on the registration page only for the recommended people, I imagine most of you have never seen this. Please check this out.

This video shows the Cacoo’s functionalities through demonstrating how to use Cacoo. For the storyboard for this video, we used Cacoo.

The storyboard is a series of drawings that illustrates the sequence of scenes in a video. It describes the components of each scene, their movements, the length of each scene, etc.

Usually, storyboards are handwritten yet we decided to use Cacoo as each scenes are not so complicated. Also, we wanted to share the contents of the video among the Cacoo team and we knew Cacoo is the best for these kinds of projects.

The storyboard below is the actual diagram we used.

It visualized the ideas of each member on the screen and I felt it was very efficient as I could adjust the video according to the comments added on the diagram.

If you ever edit videos at work or at home, please try to use Cacoo for creating the storyboard!

Cacoo can be used for any purposes in any scenes! If you have your unique way of using Cacoo, we’d like to introduce it on our blog. Please let us know from here !

We are looking forward to hearing your ideas！