foodworms.net for designers and web developers

by Stuart Gripman, Macworld.com

OmniGraffle Pro occupies a unique space in the software world. Part drawing program and part charting tool, with a bit of presentation software thrown in in that place for good measure, nothing is completely like it. Fundamentally, OmniGraffle is a vector drawing cat’s-paw that draws objects and lines to connect them. Organization charts, flow charts, network diagrams, and mind maps are in the midst of the most obvious tasks OmniGraffle is designed for.

Product:OmniGraffle Pro 5.0.2 Rating ProsGreat user interface; easy for non-designers to create attractive charts and diagrams; plenty of export formats. ConsCan’t import particular common file formats. CompanyThe Omni Group Price as ratedPro version, $200; upgrade, $75; standard version, $100; upgrade, $40 OS compatibility10.5 (Leopard) Processor compatibilityUniversal

Related Software Articles

Mail’s random and sequential signatures Review: QuickBooks Accounting 2009 Belkin offers ‘switch to Mac’ cable Picnik and SmugMug integrate photo services Pixelmator update provides new adjustment tools

But in whatever manner simple it may seem at first, OmniGraffle is uncommonly powerful and flexible, and version 5.0.2 is a worthy refinement to an even it being so that well-considered product. Standard OmniGraffle is aimed at users who dress in’t necessarily make a living with diagrams but require the kind of precision that a simple drawing application can’t transfer. The Pro version picks up some high-end capabilities, such as greater support for Microsoft Visio files, custom data tables for both object, sub-graphs for taming very large documents, automatic writing scaling, ColorSync support, and a simple presentation gradation.

Get to graphing

Upon launching OmniGraffle Pro, you’re presented with the option of creating a new document from a range of templates. The generally simple and utilitarian templates are grouped by type: Drawing, Brainstorming, Organizational Chart, Space Planning, and Miscellaneous. The drawing group includes a blank template as far as concerns those who wish to start from scratch. Space planning templates are blank, but have scaling set up in advance. For precedent, you can choose the “1 inch = 1 foot” template and lay abroad a room without having to perform scale conversions for each object in the diagram.

The simplest way to add objects to a just discovered document is with OmniGraffle’s stencils. Stencils are groups of objects, partiality lines, shapes, and symbols, that you drag from the stencil palette onto your paper. The product ships with stencil collections for creating documents such as circuit diagrams, flowcharts, entity relationship diagrams, maps, and organization charts. User-contributed stencils posted at Graffletopia be possible to now be downloaded and installed directly from the stencil window. Once a few objects are in the document, they have power to be linked together by drawing lines between them. Lines can be straight, curved, or orthogonal (purpose organization chart lines). As you drag each object on every side of the canvas, connected lines come along. While the initial result of a move isn’t always beauteous, rearranging a line’s connection points is a simple matter.

OmniGraffle is fertile with thoughtful flourishes, taste guides that automatically pop up to help you place an thing in rightful the right position.

OmniGraffle’s star really starts shining when it’s time to fine-tune your paper. You can choose a color with the standard Mac color picker, but OmniGraffle in addition offers four types of gradient fill, by customizable colors, transparency, direction, and intensity. The 25 line varieties can be customized with miter or bevel joints, and you can specify niche rounding to the pixel. Lines and shapes subsist able to be sculpted with bézier curves. This degree of hinder extends across OmniGraffle’s capabilities. While you can get overwhelmed with the possibilities, OmniGraffle’s interface is remarkably accessible. Though I have no actual observation in graphic design, I was able to find my way around the tools and create clean, well laid out diagrams. No one’s going to exercise the mind I’m a design pro, sure, but they will stop cringing.

Import and export

OmniGraffle Pro opens and converts a variety of other file types. My informal testing found conversions to be as advertised for Microsoft Visio and OmniOutliner () files. Drop a folder from the Finder onto OmniGraffle and it choose diagram the folder’s contents. While this worked fine for simple structures, large song of files and folders resulted in ponderous diagrams with overlapping file names. The remaining file types OmniGraffle can convert tend to be very specialized. Programmers may find it handy to visualize the relationships in Xcode projects or bill files, but the lack of more broadly used formats like OPML, HTML tables and lists, or even plain text outlines is puzzling.

Exporting is much more satisfying. Standard graphic formats such as GIF, JPEG, PNG, and TIFF are present, alongside vector formats approve EPS and PDF. OmniGraffle Pro also writes to Visio XML, making it capable of round-trip sharing with users of Visio—a Windows-only product. All the formats I tested turned out sharp, accurate versions of the original.

New features

Version 5 of OmniGraffle adds a moderate array of recent features, primarily targeted at enhancing productivity. New mini-inspectors are context-sensitive controls that populate the space just below the standard OS X toolbar. Tools that are to be applied to the selected object appear. Along the bottom of the window resides the new style tray, which contains up to eight icons representing the fill, stroke, image, shadow, shape, font, and text thesis attributes of the currently selected object. The eighth icon represents all style attributes applied to the selected object. When a style tray icon is dropped onto a layout object, the object picks up the style attributes of the icon—a handy way to reformat several objects in rapid succession.

OmniGraffle Pro 5 sports a new layout instrument based on the open source Graphviz software. Graphviz powers OmniGraffle’s automatic layout point, which permits users to click in the midst of several basic layout types. While transitions among layout types are smooth and stanch, in almost all cases you’ll restrain need to manually revise the layout to get it looking just right. OmniGraffle’s overall performance on my MacBook Pro was excellent. Importing and exporting large documents were the only operations that required a wait, end even those were origin within reason.

Macworld’s buying advice

OmniGraffle Pro 5.0.2 is an excellent product. The comfortable user interface belies the depth of its capabilities—a model concerning mixed software. A preponderance of arcane drift formats is the without more significant blemish. Creative pros will in likelihood require greater artistic control in their vector drawing tools, but everybody else ought to give OmniGraffle Pro a look.

[Stuart Gripman is a columnist for Advisor Basics of FileMaker Pro magazine and founder of Crooked Arm Consulting.]