Graffling
It’s been awhile now since I discovered an application so wonderful that it reminds me all over again why I use a Mac, but with the recent release of OmniGraffle 3.0 Pro I’m happy to report that I’ve once again glimpsed software nirvana!
While OmniGraffle 2 was a nice little app, it was hardly proper competition for that other Seattle-based software company’s behemoth offering, Visio. Version 3, however, adds an impressive array of features (including Photoshop-style guides and layers, improved drawing tools, a full-screen presentation mode, and even export to Visio) that go a long way toward narrowing the gap. OmniGraffle is now to Visio what Keynote was to Powerpoint—a scrappy upstart that takes on an established giant and not only matches it, but also bests it in important ways.
As a Cocoa developer, I must also admit (over the certain protests of Mac UI purists) that the stunning, custom GUI work Omni did for OmniGraffle 3 is a large part of the attraction for me. I particularly admire the system of collapsable inspector palettes.
They may be fairly similar to what Microsoft implemented for the OS X version of Office, but I think they offer a number of nifty improvements. For example, unlike the Microsoft palettes, Omni’s palettes are dockable—they can be separated, strewn around the screen and then rejoined into a group (there’s even a cool animated cue that Omni uses to let the user know when a palette is about to be “docked.”
It seems to me that OmniGraffle has, of late, been on the receiving end of a lot of love in the weblogging community (see Meg Hourihan’s “War Justification Process” diagram or Tom Coates’s trackback explanation for examples). I suspect that this is largely the result of a very smart move on Omni’s part: to strike a bundling deal with Apple, whereby OmniGraffle is pre-installed on every new “pro” Macintosh. Like me, a lot of new Mac owners have learned to love OmniGraffle simply because it is there. Given the impressive work Omni has done, I suspect a large number of these same people will gladly take the plunge and pay to upgrade to 3.0.
Now, if only we can get Omni to publicly release some of that lovely GUI work as part of their Omni Frameworks…