Feature idea

[Greg Titus]

Hi Scott,

On Sunday, December 16, 2001, at 09:50  PM, Scott Brown wrote:
> 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.

Actually, it would probably be a lot more work to reproduce all of the 
Outliner features people might want inside Graffle than it would be to 
add a bunch of options to the import feature. I don't think we're likely 
to add that kind of outlining ability to Graffle itself because I think 
we'd really rather make each of our apps as tightly focused and useful 
in its area as we can while also making them as interoperable as 
possible, instead of putting everything and the kitchen sink into each 
one.

So - more options for outline import - but we wouldn't really want to 
add those options just to the outliner import feature probably. If you 
want better/different hierarchical layout options for outlines, other 
people probably want the same better/different hierarchical layout 
options for their Graffle documents that aren't from outlines.

So this is a lot less than you were asking for, but it sounds to me like 
the main thing missing from your work flow at the moment is an 
additional automatic layout mechanism besides Graffle's existing 
hierarchical and force-directed layout tools. If you could just press a 
button to 'correctly' layout your graph, then it would be easy to either 
make the change in Outliner and re-import, or to add the couple 
additional shapes in Graffle. (It sounds like it would also be nice to 
have tighter integration between the two - live updating maybe? But 
that's mostly a different topic.)

Would that get you most of the benefits you are looking for, do you 
think?

If so (or even if not - it'd be useful either way), could you describe 
or send us samples of how your site maps are laid out, and what kind of 
geometric spacing options, et cetera, you think would be useful?

Thanks,
	--Greg