Feature idea

[Scott Brown]

Hi folks.  I wrote a rather longish feature suggestion email to the
OmniGraffle team a long while back, and never really heard anything about it
one way or the other.  No big deal - Omni's engineers are busy people.
Anyhow, I thought I'd pass what I wrote around on this list, just to see if
any of you have thoughts on the feature concept:

"Hi, here's a little something that came to me today while I used your
OmniGraffle and Outliner apps-

I recently saved an OmniOutliner document and tried importing it into
OmniGraffle just to see what the resulting graph looked like.  It turned out
(unsurprisingly) looking rather sprawling and unreadable, but only because I
didn't have any options for how the imported outline looked as a graph.
That got me thinking about how it would be useful if I had options on how
the imported outline turned into a graph, whether it be horizontally
oriented or vertically, read left to right or right to left, etc.  Of
course, the number of people who would buy licenses for both programs and
use them in tandem is likely rather low, so implementing a complicated
import options system doesn't make sense as a time expenditure.

Then it hit me- what if you had a collapsible drawer on the left side of
each document where you could start creating (or modifying, but we'll get
there in a second) your graph as an outliner-like list?  I've always thought
that it would be easiest to build a hierarchical graph by typing
hierarchical text and having the program handle the layout and spacing
annoyances for me automatically, yet allowing me to make changes to the
preconstructed layout as I wished if necessary.  One of the biggest Graffle
time sucks for me now, as a web designer, is when a client says that he
wants a few new pages added to the flow chart here and there.  I have to
then respace my entire graph to accommodate the new additions and still be
properly spaced and aligned.  If the graph were displayed as a textual
outline to the left of the pictorial graph, I could just add an item in the
textual hierarchy and have  the program handle the headache of spacing and
alignment.  Extending even further on this, you could have preselectable
styles for graphs created in this manner - the user would pick the line
style and box style to be used throughout each hierarchical graph he creates
in the drop drawer.  If he's editing an old graffle that has a style not in
the list, the program could accommodate for this as best as it could,
drawing the style of new objects from the other objects around it.  Users
could define their own line and geometric saved style presets to be included
in the list in the drawer.

When you think about it, constructing a hierarchical graph with ten items in
the current Graffle program now takes a little while to do.  If this feature
were implemented, a user would be able to build or modify tremendously
complicated, perfectly spaced hierarchical charts in thirty seconds flat,
with the user's line, color, font, and shape settings already in place.
Think about how long it would take to type a list like this in outliner
(each dash "-" delineates a level of indentation):

Main Entrance page
-News Index
--Current News Items
--Archived News Items
--Featured News items
-Interviews Index
--Current Interviews
--Archived Interviews
--Featured Interviews
-Editorials Index
--Current Editorials
--Archived Editorials
--Featured Editorials
-Search content
--Search results
--Most popular searches
-Site Map
-Contact us
--Editorial contact page
--Managerial contact page
--Staff Bios
--Mailing information
--Legal packet

Now think about how long it would take to make the site map graph of this,
starting at Main Entrance Page and branching out to the six children pages
(News, Interviews, Reviews, Search, Sitemap, Contact), branching out to the
sixteen children's children pages (Current News Items, Archived News Items,
etc).  And this is only a relatively small site with three levels (parent,
child, child's child) and a few items under each section.  The efficiency
for making and editing hierarchical graphs would shoot through the roof with
the addition of the feature described above."

Any thoughts on this?

Cheers,
DSB


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