OmniGraffle 4.1.2 review
DownloadOmniGraffle helps you draw beautiful diagrams, family trees, flow charts, org charts, layouts, and (mathematically speaking) any other directed or non-directed graphs.
|
|
OmniGraffle helps you draw beautiful diagrams, family trees, flow charts, org charts, layouts, and (mathematically speaking) any other directed or non-directed graphs.
We've had people use Graffle to plan plotlines for a story, make an overview of an operating system, show the evolution of computers, and even show how diseases can spread in a closed population.
If you want to organize your thoughts, your projects, or even your friends graphically using boxes and lines, OmniGraffle is your tool.
Here are some key features of "OmniGraffle":
Graphing Tools
OmniGraffle knows what makes a diagram different from a drawing, and gives you the tools to create amazing diagrams quickly and easily. Lines stay connected to their shapes, unlike with illustration programs, where you would have to redraw your diagram every time you moved something. In-depth graphing features include connector magnets that you can manually add, edit, and remove - so you can attach a line to a specific point on a shape and have it stay there.
Styles
Styles are the visual elements that define the look of shapes in your document. And with OmniGraffle, you've got lots of options for creating beautiful antialiased diagrams that print exactly how they appear on your screen. Fill your shapes with solid or partially transparent colors (or drop in an image to be offset or tiled within your shape), render complex shadow schemes, define your shape's borders with any number of line types - or just copy a series of styles from another shape.
Smart Guides
New to OmniGraffle 3.0, smart guides help you lay out compelling documents in a flash. When you move a shape, distance markers pop up and tell you when your new shape is going to form an equally-spaced row or column with any other shapes. In addition to that, centerlines (or edge lines) draw when you are horizontally or vertically perfectly in line with another shape in your drawing, or the centerline of the canvas. When you're rotating or resizing a shape, markers tell you when your rotation/size matches that of other shapes. Now instead of having to rely on a grid or your best guess, OmniGraffle tells you exactly how to create accurate and appealing diagrams.
Import & Export
OmniGraffle supports almost any type of image that can be placed from your network or dragged from a web page. You can also import a number of different file types, including Interface Builder files, Project Builder files, EOModeler files, Mac OS X frameworks, Diagram 2 files, OmniOutliner files, and web-standard DOT files. Want to see something really cool? Drag a folder from your network into OmniGraffle to see it laid out graphically, with the correct icons representing your file types. Export options include TIFF, JPEG, PNG, EPS, PDF, and HTML.
OmniGraffle Professional can also import and export Visio 2002 XML files.
Actions
With the Action inspector, you can set any item in your diagram to link to a web address, AppleScript, or file - the shape becomes clickable when OmniGraffle is in Browse mode, so you can link to extra information to create powerful interactive documents. You can also use the Action panel to link a shape to a specific location in your document, so when it's clicked you can move or zoom in on a new area.
Link to different pages within your file.
Auto Layout
The Automatic Layout inspector lets you have your diagram lay itself out according to the rules you specify. Choose "hierarchical" to lay out your document in the familiar "tree" format - like in an org chart or family tree. "Force-directed" uses the "forces" you select to determine how your chart should look. Behind the scenes, OmniGraffle is using complicated mathematical algorithms to figure out your layout, you just tell it what to try next. Any messy diagram can be magically organized with just one click!
Style & Selection
Selection & Style allows you to see what styles make up any shape in your document - from image fills to shadows to strokes - as well as how many objects you have selected versus how many there are on the canvas. The Selection functionality lets you select a whole class of objects (all squares, or all red circles, or...) and make changes to that class in one fell swoop. That means you won't have to select items one by one to make sweeping changes to your document.
New to OmniGraffle 3.0 is the ability to drag and drop styles onto other shapes to duplicate them. Styles can be dragged separately to apply only a certain attribute to a shape (ie, a blue dashed line only) or as a group to copy the entire style.
Stencils
OmniGraffle comes with several collections of common objects to help you create a number of different types of diagrams, like the Network Diagram, Office Layout, Org Chart, and UML stencils. It's also very easy to create your own customized drawing tools by drawing your own shapes or dragging in existing graphics onto a new stencil.
Canvas Style Pull-downs
Tools now have pull-down menus that display the various styles you have used in a particular document, so if you're drawing a new shape and you want to match an existing shape's style perfectly, simply select the style from the menu and begin drawing. Even if you're editing someone else's document it's easy to make your additions match perfectly with the original author's work.
Your favorite styles can be stored permanently in the same pull-down, to be used over and over again.
Style & Shape Tools
The Style and Shape tools allow you to quickly duplicate existing (surprise!) styles and shapes. With the Style brush, you can select any item in your document and copy its visual attributes, then "paint" them onto other items. The Shape Stamp lets you quickly duplicate any shape - styles and all - onto other sections of your canvas.
Aqua Interface
OmniGraffle’s look and feel is a seamless Mac OS X experience. OmniGraffle has the same intuitive interface as Mac OS X itself, but the support isn’t just skin deep – OmniGraffle comes with familiar features such as Apple’s color picker, fonts palette, dialogue sheets, and built in spell checking.
What's New:
Flipped the X and Y for the Zoom Tool, so that it chooses the one which will zoom in the least.
Replaced two .nib files for the Simplified Chinese Localization.
OmniGraffle 4.1.2 keywords