The Omni Group

Good day.

It took me a while to realize this, but almost every time I need to put some kind of stuff on a page, and it makes a difference where on the page that stuff is, OmniGraffle ends up being the best tool for the job.

Let me 'splain: OmniGraffle might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you need to fill out some official forms for the U.S. Government. Or, say, some character sheets for your weekend Dungeons & Dragons session. But it should be. Check this out:

• Grab an electronic version of the form you need to fill out. Scan it if you have to, but most official forms are available as PDFs these days. Some of them even claim to be fillable, but I've never gotten them to work properly in Preview or Acrobat.
• Copy each page from the document (in Preview) and paste it onto a fresh OmniGraffle canvas.
• For each canvas, lock the layer that has the form on it, and create a new layer for your information.
• Make text objects all over the canvas to fill in each blank. Once you have a text object you like, you can Option-drag it or paste it all over and just replace the text.

Why this is so much handier than filling out forms by hand:

• You can use the alignment inspector and smart guides to make sure everything is lined up just right and perfectly legible.
• If some of the boxes are really tiny, you can play around with the font to get everything to fit in there just right.
• Filling out the same info over and over is easy: just copy and paste the existing text objects with the info you need.
• Once you've saved the file, you automatically have a backup copy for reference or revision.
• You can make an OmniGraffle template that has the right paper size, two layers per canvas, and a nice grid for keeping things orderly.

When I was going through the process to get someone a visa to live in the USA, this technique saved me heaps of time and stress. And now I have backups of every form (there are lots of forms involved).

Have you found any weird or unexpected uses for Omni apps? Maybe next time I'll tell you about how I'm using OmniGraffle as a level editor for a video game I'm working on…

Happy Valentine's Day, and much love has been directed at OmniGraffle since the 4.1.2 release last August.

Shape combinations have been meticulously looked over and we've fixed the lion's share of bugs that have resulted in unexpected results, error panels, and a crash or two. There are still a small number of outstanding issues that will be addressed before the final release.

Microsoft Visio XML import and export support has gotten a good deal of attention as well, fixing rendering bugs as well as allowing objects on master canvases and text variables to export properly.

Along with hundreds of bug fixes, we've offered a few new features as well: Basic shapes can now be converted to custom polygonal/bezier shapes and vice versa; Layers can now be merged; Files can be compressed upon saving. Three's also the Document Settings Inspector—A new inspector has been added which shows document creation and change information, allows file compression, and per-document settings for saving the file as a flat file or file package. Currently this inspector resides in the Canvas: inspector group, we are considering breaking it out into its own group; feedback is greatly appreciated.

OmniGraffle 4.2 beta 1 requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later to run.

Please understand that this version is still under development, and due to the large number of changes and fixes in this first beta release, foreign language localizations are pretty broken. The beta 2 release will be the UI freeze, and that release will be the one released to our localization teams for that work to be done. Apologies to our international users for the inconvenience this may cause. As always, OmniGraffle 4.1.2 is still available for download.

Voluminous release notes are up for perusal, please direct your feedback to our support page or by using the Send Feedback feature in your copy of OmniGraffle.

Enjoy the new beta now!

Welcome to the third, and for this week anyway, final installment of “You Ask, We Answer!”. Brought to you by Diet Coke and the letter Q.

(Q for Qwality!)

Ayjay asked, many Mac developers have moved away from the use of drawers (especially now that Apple has taken them away from Mail) but you guys still feature drawers-a-plenty. What do you like about drawers? Have you thought about any other ways of implementing the functionality that drawers give you?

Ooh, good question. I had to call in the troops for help on this one, since my opinions on drawers are mainly limited to the kind you put your socks in. Ken, our CEO, and Bill, our UI Lead, put their heads together to answer you:

'We like drawers because they are a great place for content that belongs to the main window but doesn't necessarily need to be there all the time. They're great for “source lists”, from which you can choose what to view in the main window, like OmniGraffle's canvases or OmniWeb's tabs. Perhaps best of all, unlike a sidebar, you can show, hide, or resize a drawer all day long without affecting the dimensions or layout of the main content. And in Omni apps, you can move the drawer to whichever side of the window you prefer by Option-clicking the drawer button in the toolbar.

The problem with drawers, of course, is that the things just don't look modern. While the rest of Mac OS X interface was getting the sleek plastic or metal treatment, drawers are still as pinstripey, space-wastey, and noisy as they were the day they were introduced. Unless we want to cobble together and maintain some sort of custom fake drawer ourselves (or—gasp!—Apple actually updates drawers' appearance), we're going to have to get away from drawers eventually.

In meetings for our new products, we've talked about how to deal with this problem, and we think we may have come up with a good hybrid of the useful drawer and the sleek sidebar. You may end up seeing the first incarnation of it in OmniFocus, if we can do it right.'

Spencer says, I have had no luck at all with storing OmniGraffle documents in Subverson.  The icon seems to contain an illegal character or something.

Here's the response from our OmniGraffle tech support/product manager NINJA EXTRAORDINAIRE:

'This is likely due to OmniGraffle saving the files out as packages, which other file systems can have difficulty dealing with.

OmniGraffle will automatically save a file out to a package if an image or external graphic is present in the document; there is a hidden preference to avoid this behavior that can be enabled from the command line. To get OmniGraffle to always save as a “flat” file (which will have no problems on other filesystems), open up Terminal.app and paste this in:

defaults write com.omnigroup.OmniGraffle PrivateGraffleFlatFile 0

Afterwards, new documents should always save as a monolithic file, you may have to perform a “Save As” for existing documents to convert them.'

Man, I'm loving this whole 'fob off the hard questions on other Omni employees' gig. What else have you got, commenters? Bring. It. On! *spirit hands*

Matt wants to know, Do you guys plan on fixing RSS anytime soon? Its a sometimes it work, sometimes it doesn't work symptom. Usually I have to relaunch OmniWeb to get it to recheck RSS feeds- it doesn't do it by itself even though I have it set to recheck the feeds every hour.

Dang, this one's less fun to answer. Turns out we've seen this issue and we're able to reproduce it. It's a bug that we're hoping to fix in an upcoming release, after the 5.5.1 update. Sorry about that!

Conor asks, Can you tell me if OmniFocus will liason with OmniPlan so that you can plan projects in OmniPlan and then download your personal tasks into OmniFocus? Also, are there any plans to allow Wintel users to edit OmniPlan? I work in a mixed-platform office and, while I do most of the project planning on my mac, it would be nice to enable other employees to check off tasks, etc.

We would love for OmniFocus and OmniPlan to work together that way, but I think it's safe to say that they won't for OmniFocus 1.0. We're trying to limit the scope to what we can actually get out the door in a (hopefully) reasonable amount of time, but it's definitely on the plate for future consideration.

As for Wintel users…well, we likely won't ever have a cross-platform version of OmniPlan, but you can use OmniPlan to export to .mpx, .mpp, and MSPDI .xml for sharing with Microsoft Project and other project management applications. You can also export to a .csv file for import into Excel, and if people just need to see the data, not update it, you can export the Gantt, outline or both into several different image formats (PDF, PNG, TIFF, JPEG). And! You can export to html – either a single table of tasks, or a mini-website with a Gantt chart, tables, and calendar files that can be imported into iCal, Outlook or other calendaring apps.

Thanks for all your questions, folks, and if I didn't get to yours this week, my apologies. Please stay tuned for an Exciting Announcement (note: your excitement may vary) about OmniWeb I will be posting later today. Same blog time, same blog channel.

The nice folks over at Computer Systems Odessa (they make ConceptDraw) have made available a web service to convert files from the binary .vsd file format to the Visio XML document format, .vdx.

So, if you're stuck with a bunch of native Visio documents but don't have access to Visio 2002 or Visio 2003, you can use this to convert them to the XML format.

Check it out.

I expect this to become a very handy thing to have at hand, thanks and kudos to the ConceptDraw folks!

Martin Jaggi brought up a good point on the OmniGraffle mailing list: it would be nice to resize objects in OmniGraffle as if they were an image, not a set of objects. LinkBack makes this possible.

Say you have a nice bunch of objects in OmniGraffle you'd like to scale while having the text, stroke width, corner radii, and such scale along with them:

If you just select them all and Shift-drag the corner handle, the lines stay the same width, the corner radii stay the same, and the font size stays the same; not quite what you want:

But! If you instead select them and choose Copy As PDF from the Edit menu, you can paste a representation of all the objects as a single object:

Then you can scale the PDF like a normal image; everything scales with it:

Here's the cool part: because the PDF contains LinkBack data, you can double-click it to open an OmniGraffle window with your original objects! Edit them however you like, and when you hit Save, the PDF version updates!

Occasionally I'll stumble across an image on the web that looks strangely familiar.  Aah, the smoothness of line, the roundness of clouds, ... smells like Graffle!  Most recently I was wasting time on digg and saw some interesting network packet diagrams.  Looking at the PDF file, I could plainly see the evidence!

This got me to wondering—how many Graffle-generated PDF documents are out there.  Google to the rescue!

This turned up a bunch of interesting and strange results.  Here are my favorites from the first five pages of hits.  What other fun Graffle documents can you find on Google?  Gooffle, the sport of kings!

• Pretty pictures, really, that's what drew me to this one.  That and the math (presumably from TeXshop and/or EquationService).
• Ruby Method Dispatch.  The Kernel bone's connected to the Object bone, the Object bone's connected to the Module bone… Nice use of line hops, too.
• More line hops.  Someone probably understands this graph, but I just like trying to count the line hops.
• State of Mac Web Design, In which we learn that we need to send one Mr. Teague an OmniWeb license.  And that he considers Safari only half a browser.
• Worms!  These guys are probably pretty smart and serious, but their box titles hint at humor. The Worm Menace!
• Vassar Router Setup gives us advice that every student should learn:

  DO NOT use the “internet” port (put a piece of tape over it)

• Things that make you go, “huh?”  A WinXP memory layout diagram, made on a Mac.
• DOE Annual Review  Fermilab pimps their tape storage.
• DOJ this time.  I don't want to live in this neighborhood.
• Cake or death? A nice advert for a talk about death, but at the bottom there is a reprieve of refreshments.

Rawr, I'm a panther!  Now that I'm done wasting time on digg and google, I have something else to go do…

A while ago I returned from a family vacation to discover that our cat had gone missing. While the cat is at least 87% evil and often spends her time stealth-barfing into my shoes, I was concerned. After a worrying amount of time had elapsed and walking around shouting her name into various bushes had produced no results (well, other than being forever known as the Crazy Neighborhood Cat Lady), I turned to the one piece of software I knew could help.

That's right: OmniGraffle.

Exactly one day later, our cat made a dramatic reappearance – slightly haggard but no worse for wear.

COINCIDENCE?

I think not.

OmniGraffle: it has the page layout functions to find your lost cat. I'm in marketing, so what I say must be true!

(Note: your lost cat results may vary. Offer void where prohibited, taxed or restricted. Current version of OmniGraffle recommended for all cat-location activities.)

:::

Okay, now for some blog content you might actually care about: an update on the Omni “GTD app” progress.

Well, I don't have much news yet. Sorry, that's kind of a sucky update, but it's the truth. We have lots of feedback from everyone and a plan of sorts (including a UI mockup that is actually very exciting), it's now a matter of finding engineering resources and re-prioritizing other projects.

We're still really interested in doing this, and we are going to keep you posted on what we're doing. Hopefully when the engineers are back from WWDC we'll be able to start making some real progress.

Finally, it's been suggested that using the term “GTD” when referring to this project is maybe not such a hot idea, so we need a good code name. Want to give us one? Best suggestion wins a software license of your choice. Extra points given for sophomoric humor, pop culture references, or anything that makes us email your idea around internally with the subject line “OMG OUR USERS ARE CRAZY”. The comments sections awaits!

Well, the final release of OmniGraffle 4.1.2 has come and gone. I, much like Wim, feel that the 4.1 branch is now dead to me. This has been a very cautious release than ones past—From the initial 4.0 release to the rush of getting the universal binary version of 4.1 ready in time to patching up that release in 4.1.1, it was actually somewhat relaxing to take a slow approach this time.

Lots of little nit-picky issues and regressions that got introduced in the rush of 4.1 are now addressed and fixed, problems with inspectors corrected, Intel-specific problems cleaned up.

We hope you enjoy it.

Bug Fixes

• Diagram style preferences are now accessible to AppleScript and can be named without specifying the full path to the style.
• Fixed the use of the Enter or Return key in the Text Position Inspector on Intel machines.

• Clicking in a different input field in the Text Position Inspector will now act the same as Enter or Return on PPC machines.

• Escape key should now allow user to back out of the zoom field, restoring previous zoom setting.

Download OmniGraffle

Page 11 of 12 pages ‹ First  < 9 10 11 12 >