Reporting on all of your issues - (Sorry I'm late)

[David Kasprzyk]

Hello to Howard, Jeremy, Robert, Scott and all of the other 
OmniGraffle-Users:

First I'm sorry I haven't been able to respond to all of your messages 
recently.  I had all my finals Monday through today so I've been away 
from work and studying instead.  It feels really good to be done 
however, and now I can get back to work.

Since I have a large amount of mail messages that you guys sent, I 
figured I'd make a single email and respond to all of your issues in 
it.  So I'll start with Mr. Kaufman's 'Dot' issue.

First, I'm glad that you were able to create a usable palette item by 
adding the invisible circle in the back of the dot.  Another thing that 
I thought of that might be useful would be if you grouped the dot with a 
line instead of the circle.  You could have a couple of options; a line 
with one dot, a line with 2 dots, a chain of lines and dots to some set 
length, etc.  Then when you need a new line, simply drag off the 
line/dot combination that you need from the palette.

I will also be filing a request for either a dot creation tool or a 
feature allowing you to insert a shape along a line.  I think that 
either of these could be a very use tool within OmniGraffle, but we'll 
see what our programmers decide.

Next, I'll focus on Mr. Reichamn's gradient issue.  First, let me say 
that I hadn't played around much with the gradients in Graffle 1.2, but 
I had noticed problems with getting a radial blur to become 
transparent.  We after testing them out further, I have discovered 
several things.

The amount of transparency needed for a linear and radial blur is not 
the same.  While I could see the background at say 30% on linear, I had 
to go to around 5% transparency with the radial blur.  So it seems that 
our opacity values have a different effect for each of the gradient 
types.  I don't think this is reasonable and will be bring this up with 
our programmers.

Second, I also found that when dragging a gradient image it will lag 
quite a bit with a large number of gradient steps.  I'm not quite sure 
if this can be improved, but in the meantime, try setting your gradient 
steps way down until you've completed your overall layout of the 
shapes.  Then go ahead and increase the step to make it look better.

Finally, one idea I thought might be useful, would be to add a slider to 
allow you to make one color more prominent than the other, not always 
50/50.  Would this be useful to anyone?  If so, please let me know and 
I'll post the idea into our database.

With regards to Mr. Brown's issue, if you have a description or an 
example of the layout that you would like or any other options you'd 
like to see, please send them in and I'll make sure that they get passed 
on to our programmers, and they can look into adding them in a latter 
build.

As always, please post any ideas or comments and I will get to them, 
usually quicker than recently.  Thanks for understanding.

Sincerely,

David Kasprzyk
support at omnigroup.com

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