Ed Tech UI Guy

Friday, January 14, 2005

OmniGraffle 4

I visited MacWorld today, with Marc Brierly from Stanford. Marc is real good about talking to the vendors. We got talking with the project manager for OmniGraffle about their next release. He gave us a little sneak preview of OmniGraffle, which will be released in 3-4 months, and I was really pleased with what I saw.

I use OmniGraffle mainly for drawing wireframes. The best new feature for that was the Canvas templates. When I'm designing an app I draw each screen on a different canvas in OmniGraffle. The down side, is that the shared navigation elements need to be copied onto each screen. If I decide to change a label in the navigation, I then have to make a change on each screen. The new canvas templates will eliminate that hassle.

Another tiny feature was the ability to torn a single box into a table. I have wasted a lot of times drawing simulated data tables in OmniGraffle, so this is a major improvement for me.

There was more nice stuff (the UI got much cleaner, drawing with Bevels, and more) but those two features alone will save me hours. I can't wait to upgrade.

(You can see my family blog for more MacWorld impressions)