The Blog

Recently Featured

Complete Archives

Articles by App

OmniDazzle
OmniDiskSweeper
OmniFocus
OmniGraffle
OmniGraphSketcher
OmniObjectMeter
OmniOutliner
OmniPlan
OmniWeb

New from the Omni Group: OmniGraphSketcher

by Linda Sharps on March 25, 2009

Exciting news from Omni today, friends: we've got a brand-new product for you to try out. Introducing . . . OmniGraphSketcher.

Okay, technically it's not brand new, if you're going to be a stickler about “the truth” and all. OmniGraphSketcher was created by Robin Stewart, who designed what was originally called Graph Sketcher in 2003 while he was attending Williams College, and continued working on it at MIT where it was the basis of his master's thesis. Now that Robin's employed at Omni, he was kind enough to bring Graph Sketcher along with him, and for the last six months Omni has been hard at work developing the latest version of what is now OmniGraphSketcher.

What IS this product with the name that takes forever to type, you say? I AM SO GLAD YOU ASKED. OmniGraphSketcher is a fast, simple tool that combines the data plotting power of charting applications with the ease of a basic drawing program. In short, you use it to make graphs. Precise, sharp-looking graphs, even.

OmniGraphSketcher is designed for reports, presentations, and problem sets where you need to produce accurate, presentation-worthy graphs on the fly. You can just click and draw lines, shade in areas, connect and align objects, and add labels as you go. Or, copy and paste data from a spreadsheet into OmniGraphSketcher. All adjustments are displayed in real time, so fine tuning is a breeze.

Whether you need to make economics diagrams, illustrate a science project, display marketing data, or just re-publish the well-known Cat Proximity Phenomenon, voila—OmniGraphSketcher to the rescue. Fast, simple graph drawing, without the hassle of using a complicated data visualization program. WIN.

OmniGraphSketcher is currently in beta, and licenses are available for $29.95. Educational and family pricing are available from the Omni Group's online store.

Note: if you're an existing Graph Sketcher customer, you're eligible for a free upgrade to OmniGraphSketcher, and will receive notification of your upgrade status via email.

You can follow OmniGraphSketcher on Twitter at @OmniGS.

Now, go forth and download! You can use OmniGraphSketcher in unlicensed mode for a two-week trial, with no restrictions. Enjoy!

 

Comments

Hey guys, that's very cool. In fact, I use OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner and OmniFocus and … GraphSketcher, too. So guessing from the software I bought, GraphSketcher is a very good addition to your product portfolio. I guess a lot of your customers will like this application. Two thumps up.

Thomas

03.25.09 5:46 AM

very very cool. although one year two late for me - i wish i had this during my studies…

mullzk

03.25.09 6:24 AM

So I would be very interested in the thinking of releasing this as a different product vs. adding this functionality to OmniGraffle, for instance. I use OmniGraffle for a lot of the same stuff today and am looking forward to seeing what OmniGraphSketcher can do. To me (and it might just be me), if feels a lot more like a feature to the set of OmniGraffle functionality vs. a separate app.

ecarr

03.25.09 9:00 AM

I own pretty much every Omni product except Plan, but I'll have to take a pass on this one until it support error bars and stationary/libraries, which I don't see…

SunByrne

03.25.09 9:05 AM

As I'm studying economic sciences, this tool is great for me. Thank you very much!

cephyr

03.25.09 9:05 AM

I have been a GraphSketcher-user for ages, and I love this product to death. I think that most of that can be done with OmniGraffle, but the idea of GS is: Speed through simplicity. The power lies in the limited toolset which is directly accessible and I hope this will not be watered down by adding too many new functions which are better put in OmniGraffle. As I see it, GS is less of a product for the “hardcore IT guy”, more a product for the “management PowerPoint guy” who spent nights of despair over preparing graphs in PP. I am one of these and must have saved dozens of hours already :)

Kenny

03.25.09 11:37 PM

There's a great need in the scientific community for a relatively simple plotting package—think Cricket Graph, rather than Prism or SigmaPlot. This could go in that direction, but it's not there yet. In addition to error bars, some curve fitting/stats would be good too.  Occasionally, I need to just draw a graph to illustrate a model, but more often I need to plot real data, and this doesn't appear to be strong enough, yet. I also often need log scales.

JDA

03.26.09 3:34 AM

I've never used GraphSketcher, but I'm VERY excited about Omni working in this area! As a scientist, there is a great unmet need for a tool that easily creates presentation- and publication-quality graphs. I'm hoping for a few more basic features (error bars?), at which point I can see this being an app I'd use every day!

Mike

03.26.09 3:55 AM

I downloaded the beta to try - does not have log scales on the axes, no 3d graphs, cannot input equations to plot, am wondering if Omnigraffle ain't sufficient.

Zoboomafoo

03.26.09 4:34 AM

There is one important feature missing, which makes it all but useless for presenting scientific data - no error bars. Add a feature to specify the error for each value (a third column, or even two columns, for x and y errors) and you have a winner.

Pawel

03.26.09 6:37 AM

I'm a long time user of OS X Plot (http://plot.micw.eu/). The interface is a little quirky but it more than makes up for it in terms of large scale data support, programmability, script interfacing, and multiple layering of data. I realize GraphSketcher is BETA—but I hope some of the aforementioned functionality finds its way into this app or I see a very limited audience. I'm not sure “sketching” a plot is going to fly in the scientific community (I'm a bioinformatician, BTW) as plots/graphs should be data driven and precise; normalization and smoothing should occur via algorithmic compression and not hands-on manipulation. Not trying to be negative, just honest here. I love all of the OmniGroup products and couldn't live without OmniOutliner or OmniFocus.

Todd W.

03.26.09 3:53 PM

I know you want to make your screencast simple and short, but to me it came across as an empty exercise in drawing pretty curves. If the software is what I think it is, you need to show us some real (or made-up, if you must) data, and then show us how that data is transformed into an elegant visual form using OGS. I think we need to see two cases of this: one where the data is just in words and everything is done from scratch in OGS; and one (more important in my view) where we have numbers in Excel or Numbers and you show us how to import it and mold it to our purposes.

Rick

03.26.09 4:05 PM

Wow… looks great!

B. Noser

03.26.09 4:07 PM

As my plotting needs are fairly complex (error bars, reading data from text files, log scaling, plotting equations, etc., etc.), I'll probably pass on this.


But: kudos for the xkcd reference!

Peter Erwin

03.26.09 10:34 PM

Hi,


looks quite nice, but I also need to plot functions and fitting data into predefined functions. So I still work with gnuplot.

Rene SB

03.28.09 6:20 AM

Beautiful interface and I would probably use it for simple things but I too require a log scale for much of what I do :(

Dilettare

04.10.09 12:15 PM

Would also love to have double y axis graphs.  Great product

Kurt T

04.28.09 12:19 AM
Commenting is not available in this channel entry.