Review: OmniGraffle 2.0

Product Name/Version: OmniGraffle 2.0
OS X?: Yes, OS X only
Company: OmniGroup
URL: http://www.omnigroup.com
Category: Diagramming Utility
Requirements: Mac OS X 10.1
Price: License Key: $59.95; Boxed Edition: $64.95 + s&h; limited Free Version available (viewer/demo)
Date of Review: 5/9/02
Rating: 3.8 bounces - Pure Lust

Ratings Legend

One Bounce: Lustless

This product is uninspiring and not only lacks lust appeal, but it also lacks even the possibility of lust-production.

Two Bounces: Lack-Luster

If you need what it is that this product does, look elsewhere or wait, it lacks lust-appeal.

Three Bounces: Lustworthy

A few rough spots here and there, but overall a high quality item worthy of lust.

Four Bounces: Pure Lust

Unalloyed lust.

OmniGroup recently shipped version 2.0 of its diagramming utility, OmniGraffle. Leaping straight from version 1.1, OmniGraffle has reinvented itself as a truly versatile and mature program, combining intuitivity and ease of use with a surprisingly wide array of features for its category. While the main goal of the new version might have been adding new functionality, new preferences or new refinements wherever it was conceivably possible, the most striking -- and possibly most welcome -- change is a redesigned user interface that does away with a lot of the quirks and questionable choices of previous versions. Version 2.0 is a free upgrade for 1.1 users -- and a must-have one too.

The Digital Napkin Concept

The objective of OmniGraffle is not merely to cater to the needs of "corporate executives drawing org charts," or other inveterate chart-maniacs. OmniGroup argues that you may need diagrams, ("any directed or non-directed graphs," in a mathematical sense) even if you don't think you do. Actually, whenever you draw sketches (perhaps on "the back of a napkin") about how things work or how they are organized, you're probably right in OmniGraffle territory.

What this clever piece of software does is use Cocoa's beautifully rendered graphics classes to draw boxes and connect them with "smart" lines. Unimpressed? Let me put it another way: what OmniGraffle attempts to do is provide you with virtually anything you could ever imagine you need for drawing boxes and connecting them with lines. And that often surpasses what programs costing almost ten times as much can offer in that particular field.

With OmniGraffle, colors, gradients, shadows and transparency are a trifle. So is adding text, with Cocoa's beautiful typography, elegant in-place spell-checking, and find/replace functionality. So is organizing your work, and creating and saving presets. Moreover, from simple grids or alignment/spacing tools to hierarchical or force-directed auto-layout features, you'll have more options than you can think of, and they were all created with a great deal of thought and attention to detail. That also includes usability: if (and when) your needs are limited to basic functions, OmniGraffle's mushrooming features won't distract you from doing your job. They are neatly tucked away under menus or in palettes you won't see unless you want to.

The picture is not entirely rosy, though. In addition to minor annoyances, a pretty bad flaw is the inability to correctly print objects with transparency -- something OmniGroup blames on the Quartz framework of OS X. However, no user will care whom to blame when his or her beautifully rendered graphics will end up looking seriously dumbed-down in print. The only workaround is to export such graphics as bitmap images and print those, losing much of the crisp vector shapes PostScript printers could otherwise render so beautifully. OmniGroup notes that you can alleviate the problem by exporting at a very high resolution (DPI).

But all in all, OmniGraffle certainly does push the envelope on diagramming. If you're still not convinced that diagramming is in your future, you can always download OmniGraffle anyway and try it: without a license, OmniGraffle can be used as a viewer to look at OmniGraffle documents, and you can also get your feet wet by creating, editing and saving simple diagrams not in excess of 20 shapes. But then if you've recently bought, or are going to buy, a new Power Mac, OmniGraffle is already part of your deal, coming bundled with the Mac.

Beauty and Brains: Cocoa and Beyond

OmniGraffle 2.0 is a beautiful piece of software. Just like most other offerings of OmniGroup, it's a Cocoa application, running on Mac OS X only, and was designed with Apple's software design principles in mind.

As a result, OmniGraffle looks the way Apple wants new software to look. Unlike the Carbonized versions of programs by Adobe, Microsoft and other longtime developers, whose OS X ports all but gave an Aqua-ish facelift to their decade-old, cross-platform palettes or toolbars, OmniGraffle uses the brand-new Cocoa building blocks you can find in some of Apple's own OS X software titles, such as Mail, iDVD 2, or iPhoto. OmniGraffle looks totally "at home" in Mac OS X. Unlike most big software vendors, OmniGroup definitely "gets" what Aqua is all about. No icon or widget looks out of place. I wish I could say the same about at least one OS X product from Adobe, Macromedia or Microsoft...

Its Cocoa origin bestows upon OmniGraffle, among other features, a customizable title bar, vector graphics with magnificent antialiasing, and of course, such well-familiar staples as the ubiquitous Color picker, the Fonts palette, dialog sheets, built-in spell checking, and speech support. As you'd expect from a well-behaved Cocoa application, the toolbar lets you hide it or customize it (even in-place, from a contextual menu), as well as command-drag to reorder any of its icons. Some of these features, by the way, required hardly any coding from the developers: they're almost automatically added to any Cocoa application. Other niceties, however, speak volumes about the developers' great attention to detail, as well as a great deal of thought put into planning this particular version.

For the most basic tasks, you use nothing but a handful of drawing and selection tools, as well as a few mouse clicks with keyboard modifiers. Tasks you can do right away, without virtually any learning, include drawing predefined shapes, moving them around, connecting them with lines, or adding and editing text to shapes or line labels. Moving shapes won't break connections: lines flow and stretch gracefully, in real time, as you move your objects on the screen. The user interface is very straightforward and intuitive, so you'll find yourself diagramming away in no time. But as you dig deeper, you'll find that OmniGraffle puts a surprising amount of control in your hands, including subtle, though immensely useful preferences you rarely see even in much more complicated applications.

Drawing Basics

Selecting and drawing a shape

Basic drawing begins with using the Shape tool to draw predefined basic shapes. OmniGraffle has 35 such shapes, including triangles, quadrilaterals, ovals, stars, simple 3D blocks and cylinders, and so on. You cannot change these 35 shapes: those will be your building blocks for your diagrams. There is a freeform polygon tool, but that's the closest you can get to freehand drawing. The Shape tool has an icon representing the shape it will draw, you can select that shape from the Shape Info Pane. (More on Info Panes later.)

You can draw connection lines with the Line tool. To draw a straight line, click to set the starting point, then double-click to set the end point. If you're not just connecting two points, but also adding several "turning points," by default, the Line tool will draw pleasant-looking curvy paths rather than edgy, zigzagged lines. However, you can also set it up to do just that. Also by default, a line will have one carefully directioned arrowhead, though you have several arrowhead options to choose from for both ends of your line. In a nice touch, the button for the Line tool changes to represent the current arrow style.

Same lines, different settings

You can double-click at a shape or a line to add text labels to it. You'll have the usual Cocoa typographic controls for setting beautiful type: the Fonts panel, the Colors palette, plus ligatures and kerning. Moving labels along lines or manipulating text flow are considered more "advanced" tasks, and are thus only accessible from Info Panes.

You can also evoke palettes with more complex predefined objects. OmniGraffle comes with a handful of these, including palettes with objects representing symbols used in organizational charts, ones with diagram elements for object-oriented programming, etc. OmniGroup says it's committed to providing new palettes on its web site free of charge, users are encouraged to check back every two weeks or so. Several third parties have also come up with their own (usually free) object selections. You can also build your own palettes of objects, though you'll most likely need to do the drawing elsewhere: in OmniGraffle, you can't really draw complex objects, only combinations of the 35 basic shapes, and connection lines. Luckily, you can at least import a few common graphics formats into the application.

Other graphics features include ordering, grouping, locking, or duplicating objects. All in all, the graphics tool set is intuitive, and coincides with what a user might expect from a vector graphics application -- with a few omissions. There's no keystroke for temporarily switching to a zoom tool (to draw a zoom marquee), and, more notably, there's no way to draw curvy shapes. Let's hope that the freeform polygon tool (new to 2.0) will eventually evolve into a Pen or Pencil tool. In addition, a direct selection tool would be nice, for example, to select individual parts of grouped objects. You also cannot continue an already finished line by adding new end points, though you can easily add inside points (and thus find a workaround to that omission).

The Right Connections

A line can stand on its own, but its main use is connecting shapes. Clicking a shape with the Line tool will connect the shape to the line, and OmniGraffle will maintain those connections: if you move the shape(s) or the line(s), their connections will remain.

OmniGraffle also pays attention to the connection points: lines usually connect to shapes along the latter's edges, pointing towards their midpoints, so when you move a shape or a line, its connection point will move along the shape's perimeter. However, you can also restrict the points where lines can connect by setting up "magnets" that attract endpoints: if a shape has magnets, no other connection points will be allowed. Magnets are a nice addition and a good example of the control OmniGraffle puts in your hands -- but only if you ask for it: you definitely don't need to concern yourself with magnets if you don't want to.

Keep connected: as you move or rotate objects, their connections remain, while connection points move along the objects' boundaries

Info Panes

If (and when) you want more control than the basic drawing tools offer you, you'll use Info Panes -- OmniGroup's answer to the dozens of palettes you find, for instance, in an Adobe application. Just like a "traditional" palette, an Info Pane lets you set the attributes for an object or an operation. But unlike palettes, where each has its own little window, every Info Pane can appear, one at a time, in the same Info Pane window. Thus, you can switch to the Layout Info Pane to use OmniGraffle's auto-layout capabilities, then to the Size/Shape Info Pane to rotate an object -- all in the same space. However, you can also spawn ("clone") other Info Pane windows too, straight from the Info Pane's toolbar. This way, you can emulate the traditional "palette clutter" on your screen, if you have a large enough monitor (or prefer to have all options available at all times). You can even have multiple copies of the same Info Pane, or let the Info Pane window display nothing but icons for all the different Info Panes. You can even customize the Info Pane window's title bar, creating shortcuts to your favorite Info Panes. Confused? Just open the Info Pane window in OmniGraffle (choose Tools > Show Info) , and you'll see how easy it is.

OmniGraffle's Info Pane concept has matured a lot in version 2.0. Its title bar now has a pull-down menu that, at last, allows you to select the correct Info Pane in a clear and space-efficient way. You can now also access each individual pane with a keystroke, as well as from a menu: to each his own.

You'll use Info Panes when you fine-tune the appearance of your charts, including colors, transparency, shadows, line thickness, or background images. While you can add text to a shape or a line without using an Info Pane, you'll need one to control how the text flows or how it aligns along the length of a line.

The Align pane, used for aligning or distributing multiple selected objects, is an exercise in simplicity and intuitivity. It eclipses similar solutions found in much more expensive applications. Depending on which alignment point you choose, the "align" and "distribute" buttons will change to show a graphical representation of what exactly is going to happen when you push them.

Notice how the four button images update. Left: alignment point centered; right: alignment point at bottom right

Other Info Panes let you display (and fine-tune) a grid for precision layout work, organize your document into layers, control pagination, or select the predefined shape that the drawing tool will draw. In yet another Info Pane, you can attach hyper links or AppleScripts to objects in your diagram. (In order to activate those hot spots, you need to view the document in Browse mode, available from the document window's toolbar.) A separate pane lets you work with a shape's magnets, offering quite a bit of control, though this Magnets pane, a new addition, is a bit rough around the edges.

But perhaps the coolest Info Pane of them all is the one called Layout. Here, you can automatically realign all your shapes to create a very balanced appearance, not only keeping all connections, but also letting you work with them in a really smart way. You can choose between hierarchical or force-directed layouts. In the former case, OmniGraffle will try to decipher the hierarchy between the shapes by looking at how many "subordinate" (i.e. connected) objects they have. Of course, it may get such things wrong easily in ambiguous cases, therefore you can step in and help OmniGraffle out by giving it specific instructions, like selecting a few shapes and telling OmniGraffle that they are all on the same level, even if they appear otherwise. You can also tell which direction you want the hierarchy to be displayed (left to right, top to bottom, etc.), and the rest is up to OmniGraffle: it will realign your drawing beautifully for you.

Original hierarchical graph

Graph automatically laid out by OmniGraffle. Notice how Object "e" was mistakenly placed on the same level as Object "a"

Graph automatically laid out by OmniGraffle after it was expressly told that Object "e" occupied the same level as Objects "b," "c" and "d"

The second option, "force-directed" automatic layout contains much more settings, but is probably less useful. It repositions all your objects based on pseudo-physical "forces" you can set individually: object repulsion, the pulling force of the "springs" represented by the lines, the repelling force of the canvas edge, and a (directed or non-directed) "magnetic field." You can even watch an animations of your objects assuming their final positions: a cool, but not terribly useful feature.

Final Comments

OmniGraffle can do even more. It can import from and export to different file formats. You can use it to create HTML image maps. It reads, and draws nice, simple diagrams for, Apple Project Builder and OmniOutliner documents. But where OmniGraffle really excels is its core functionality: I wouldn't think of using any other app for diagramming, even if OmniGraffle has its share of quirks and omissions (I wish transparent printing were included).

The question that comes naturally is: what next? Considering the quantum leap between versions 1.1 and 2.0, will OmniGraffle possibly improve at a similar rate? Some don't even think there's room for that. As the OmniGraffle site quotes a Macworld UK reviewer, "Usually I can think of ways to improve the applications I use, but OmniGraffle has everything I need."

However, it isn't hard to take the OmniGraffle concept further. First, OmniGroup must do something about that printing issue. (Or did I mention that already?) Just a little more versatility to the drawing tools would be a boon as well. Maybe magnets should be directly editable in-place, instead of forcing you to work with them cumbersomely in a small Info Panel. Maybe OmniGroup should discover contextual menus, too: they can be pretty useful at times... As for new features? The addition of the "browse" mode might signal a shift towards some other live presentation features. Can animation be too far down the line? I don't think it should be, especially after having seen an app as simple as MacPowerUser's iDraw offer such features.

In any case: whether or not OmniGraffle's future is bright, its present certainly is. In fact, the more similarly well-written Mac OS X applications surface, the brighter the future of the entire Mac OS X platform will start to look. Good job, OmniGroup. (Now, if only I could print transparent objects...)

Applelust Rating: Pure Lust

- András Puiz

What do you think? Talk about it in our Forums...

[an error occurred while processing this directive]