Any hiccups from WWDC and nice summer weather are now over, and the OmniGraffle 5.2 beta releases are now back on track.
Beta 6 addresses a number of nagging issues with respect to shared layers and more importantly (to some), has adjusted the sensitivity of multi-touch gestures for resizing, rotating, and zooming for those users with the trackpads to support this.
As always, the beta download page and release notes await.
We decided to nail down a few nasty issues and release another beta before running off to WWDC next week; as always you can read about said changes at the historical release notes page or the beta download page, and what follows is a brief summation.
We've addressed a couple of issues that popped up in the previous 5.2 beta 4 release, one relating to changes we made to dragging layers between canvases and shared layers, the other a repeating crash when attempting to inspect the drawing tools. Add to that some other bugs fixed concerning canvases and another crash when dragging objects from stencils, and that about sums it up.
OmniGraffle 5.2 beta 5 download page
Historical release notes
Steve Weller has a very nice tutorial along with an OmniGraffle template concerning the making of pixel-perfect icons for iPhone application toolbars up at his site.
Having gone through much the same thing myself using OmniGraffle to create icons and images and the like for Cocoa applications, it's very nice to see this sort of thing documented well.
Have a look-see for yourself, How to Draw Pixel-Perfect iPhone Toolbar Icons.
Excelsior!
A couple of important things to talk about in this release, aside from various bug fixes (which are faithfully documented in the historical release notes).
The first of which is, we've added multi-touch support for zooming the view, and resizing and rotating selections. If you've got one of the newer MacBooks that support multi-touch on the trackpad, a pinch will zoom the view in and out. If there's a selection, pinching will resize that selection, and you can also rotate said selection. Please let us know how this works out for you, we have a feeling that at present the multi-touch support is somewhat sensitive.
Secondly, we've added a hidden preference to persistently display the layer status icons in the Canvases Sidebar, to match behavior that was present in OmniGraffle 4. If you'd like to have these icons show all the time (as opposed to mouseover or in their “on” state), open up Terminal.app and paste in the following and press Return:
defaults write com.omnigroup.OmniGraffle AlwaysShowLayerStatusIcons YES
If you're running OmniGraffle Professional, the above should read as:
defaults write com.omnigroup.OmniGrafflePro AlwaysShowLayerStatusIcons YES
As always, the beta page awaits.
Enjoy!
The most recent beta release to OmniGraffle won't have a great deal immediately visible to the user; instead we've incorporated a number of under the hood changes to how our software update mechanism works to bring it more in line with other applications we have such as OmniFocus.
Hopefully this integration has gone smoothly, however if bumps in the road appear, don't hesitate to contact us.
OmniGraffle beta release download page.
Historical release notes.
Another round of bug fixes and stability issues taken care of, somewhat related to shared layers and canvases in the sidebar, among other factors.
I neglected to point out last time that the licensing code has been modified to match that of OmniFocus, meaning that a single license key will now allow one user to run OmniGraffle on two computers simultaneously, so that should make some users out there happy.
Download at the beta page, and read up on release notes.
Cheers!
OmniGraffle 5 has a great many keyboard shortcuts for various menu entries and commands, so many that we made a handy document accessible from the Help Menu to umm, help out in learning these various commands.
To take it one step further, Nick Finck at Blue Flavor has compressed this lengthy document to tabloid size so that it can be printed out and referenced without covering up what you're working on in OmniGraffle, as that could become quite frustrating indeed.
We've hoisted that same document up on our OmniGraffle Extras page, and here's a handy direct link as well.
Thanks much Nick, and cheers!
Some time passes, some code gets written, some bugs (quite a few, in fact) get fixed. This particular release zeroes in on a number of Visio import and export support fixes, direct import of PDF files has been greatly improved, and a large number of issues surrounding groups and tables have been addressed.
Just a little backstory here concerning groups, particularly those special groups in OmniGraffle that we call tables. Way back in the day when the table feature was first implemented, a number of neato features were present that over time in testing proved to be rather problematic, so they were either removed or obscured. In going over a number of group-related fixes, we've managed to address those problems, so with this release you can do some pretty neat things, including rotating tables as well as rotating individual table cells. Give it a try and see what you think.
Alongside bugs and issues with groups are a number of stability fixes in place that relate to moving and rotating groups with lines connected within, so if you've been running into a large number of cryptic crashes, you will want to take a look at this beta release.
The beta page has returned, and the historical release notes remain in the same location.
One of the best aspects of doing the work that we do is getting to see the really cool stuff that customers do with the tools we make. One such nugget of awesome came to us last Friday, when we got an email with this AppleScript as an attachment:
faces-v3
[Update: If you downloaded an earlier version of the script and it didn't work, try the updated one above. It handles the '~' in the iPhoto library preference now, and it avoids a problem that folks using a document style with no line head specified would encounter.]
The script makes use of the new Faces feature of iPhoto '09. It looks for named faces in your library, then creates an OmniGraffle document showing which ones appear in photos together. At that point, it fires off OmniGraffle's automatic layout feature. I'll let the script's author, Armin Briegel, describe the results:
“It probably depends on your picture taking habits, but in my graph you can pick out families and groups of people, such as my son's classmates. The big mess in the middle is obviously our closest friends and families. But even there the families are in close proximity to each other.”
In any case, this gets our robot-stamp of approval, so we thought other folks might want to check it out, as well. Enjoy!
Ta-da! OmniGraffle and OmniGraffle Professional 5.1.1 are now final, for those not keeping track of the beta releases, here are the relevant changes:
- Updated Tier 1 foreign language localizations for strings that were changed or added in the 5.1 release.
- Fixed a memory leak that could lead to a series of nasty crashes.
The beta page is gone for now, please to find the proper download at the download page.