Omni Graffle / Omni Outliner - thoughts and suggestions

[Tom Wiebe]

Hi there,

Well, I've almost completed my Omni workflow, having purchased Omni 
Outliner last week to go with Omnigraffle. I'd love to also purchase 
Omni Web but, as I'm sure you're aware, the style sheet support in it is 
severely broken. As soon as this is fixed, I'm so there.

Thought I'd pass on some feedback on Omni Outliner and Omni Graffle, 
they are both EXTREMELY fabulous and have made a big impact on my 
workflow. Both are set as login items! That being said, they are both 
1.x releases so I hope you'll appreciate a bit of constructive criticism.

Graffle seems to be the most complete of the two at the moment, so I'll 
start with that. I've got only 1 thing that bugs me about it and a 
couple of suggestions for future enhancements.

What really bugs me is that the tool palettes don't float and they 
aren't resizeable. Please add an option to make them float above your 
document. I'm usually using Graffle full screen, so I'm always going to 
the menu, toolbar or the keyboard to get my palettes back, this is 
rather tiresome.

It'd be really nice to be able to select the box type when importing an 
Omni Outliner document. Sometimes, I want items to go into full sized 
boxes, instead of the little "name tags" that are used now. It'd also be 
really nice to be able to have items from different levels of an outline 
import with different shapes and or background colors, for easy 
selectability.

Another thing that would be really cool would be to be able to select 
items by their text contents. I use Omnigraffle for planning my Lasso 
Development (I support all but the biggest Seattle area developers!) and 
use a variety of file suffixes depending on whether a file is an 
include, process or display file. It'd be really nice to be able to 
select all the boxes that contain ".lasso" via the find dialog.

Omni Outliner is wonderfully infuriating for me at the moment. I've been 
using Brainforest Professional from www.aportis.com for the last couple 
of years and, if it were possible to fuse Omni Outliner and Brainforest, 
I'd be happier than a pig in shit. Some of the things I really like 
about Brainforest which are missing in Outliner are:

1. Palm integration - OK, so it's unlikely that it would make sense for 
you to build a palm version of Outliner, but it would be great if I 
could somehow get Outliner documents into