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The usefulness of Flash for applications in the browser takes a giant step forward with Gliffy, a tool that provides the kind of diagramming functionality one has to pay for with Microsoft Visio.

I remember a time several years ago where I found myself in need of Visio. My employer would not buy a copy, saying the company already had one somewhere. A fruitless search for it left me creating my charts in a very ugly fashion using a bunch of other software tools.

With all the talk of Google killing Microsoft with an online productivity suite, word processing, spreadsheets, and email get a lot of attention. Diagramming, not so much. That underestimates the ground-level utility of diagram tools to people with a variety of jobs that require flowcharts and similar work.

Maybe diagramming is the killer application. It's such a low-level utility that it just doesn't attract attention, and when it is needed, well, a call to a VAR with a purchase order for Visio can bring it in house.

Unless one has discovered two-month old Gliffy already. The tool has been crafted in Flash, and the developers behind the project report in their blog they are very much aware of what users want.

They have been able to do with Flash what many developers have gained attention for by working with Ajax, a combination of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML technology. In their latest Gliffy blog post, they report 35,000 users have registered to use the service.

Recent updates included the addition of a snap-to-grid feature, probably one of the most useful features available to people who do report or diagram design work. And it isn't just clever developers like the Gliffy folks who are tuned in to the broader potential of business applications.

Adobe has a laser-like focus on Flash as well. Their Flex 2 environment arrived in June, and its construction also drove the updating that took place with Flash Player 9.

Flex 2 and Flash have been designed to help developers build and deploy Flash-based applications more effectively. Gliffy looks like the kind of front-running application one could envision being predicted by Adobe's Flash developers.

Which makes us wonder - did Microsoft see it coming too?

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.