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I've bought OmniGraffle from The Omni Group 3 times. It just keeps getting better with each version, and the tag-line "Powerful diagramming and charting" doesn't really divulge what an easy-to-use and flexible application this is. Windows users might be familiar with Microsoft Visio; think of OmniGraffle as the Mac equivalent done right. For those of you who haven't heard of either product, go check out OmniGraffle's product information page.

I previously written about flowcharts I create with OmniGraffle here. Recently I needed to update my CV and decided to re-do it and move from a simple Word layout to something a bit more eye-catching using OmniGraffle. I already had OmniGraffle 3 so downloaded the trial (with a 24 hour licence) of OmniGraffle Pro 4 to evaluate.

Several advantages of the new version/ Pro version were soon apparent:

• I could specify a background on the Master canvas for a multi-canvas (multi-page) document;
• The interface is better organised;
• I could include hyperlinks that were preserved when my document was exported to PDF;
• I could export my multi-page document to a single PDF (previously I had to use PStill to combine exports of individual pages);
• I can export my previous clinical guidelines work to Visio XML drawing format (.vdx) so it can be edited on the PC (using Visio). It can also be viewed on the PC using the free Visio 2003 Viewer which is a plug-in for Internet Explorer;
• The new "Outline" function in the Utility Drawer is really cool. Enter text in the drawer which is automatically styled and organised as a graphic object. It's a little hard to put into words, but there's a movie demonstrating this on the website;
• There's a new tool for quickly creating good-looking tables.

One thing I found difficult laying out my CV was using the Tab key to layout columns of text, and list creation using bullet points:

Because the Tab key doesn't work as you expect it to (it moves you to another object rather than indenting text) I used Word to organise my text into appropriate columns and cut-and-paste this into a box in OmniGraffle, repeating the process and adjusting the tabs until it looked right—not very elegant but it worked! It wasn't possible to preserve list formatting at all. There is nothing in OmniGraffle's help file about using tabs or lists. I wrote to the Feedback address and the kind folks replied with the solution:

Quite simply: Show the ruler when editing text. Tab stops are there (by default it's Option-Tab to make a tab space, there is a preference to make the normal Tab put in a tab space instead of cycling to the next object), and if you are running Tiger there's a new list feature in the text ruler as well.

A hidden talent worth sharing: I wouldn't have found this in a million Sundays (since I otherwise have no use for the ruler).

It's an expensive upgrade from the Standard "3" version to the Pro "4" version: around £50. It's an application I use frequently (joining BBEdit and NetNewsWire as my fav "Big Three" OS X add-ons) so I could just about justify it. Try it out; maybe you can too?

A suggestion for improvement

Here is an idea I've asked to go on the "feature requests" list at Omni Group. Say you've done a diagram and in the View menu select to show Notes and Actions. In the case of Notes OmniGraffle shows a generic blue text icon and in the case of an attached Word file, a round blue icon with a mini Word document icon inside it. This is way cool, and I've already started using the outliner feature to manage a big "to do" list with attached documents and reminder notes.

Although it's plain to see such info in OmniGraffle itself, this isn't so when it comes to sharing on an intranet, for example (export your document as an HTML image map); there is no visual indication that an object has a hyperlinked document attached, and any Notes are completely lost.

I proposed that Omni Group include an option to:

1. Preserve the document-type Action icon in the exported HTML map and make this a clickable map object;
2. Preserve the Notes icon in the exported HTML map and display the notes themselves on mouseover as a "title" attribute.

As you can see in my mock-up, it is immediately clear a) what type of document is being linked to and b) the utility of small snippets of text is preserved without having to create a new document to store them:

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