I recently went looking for a program to easily draw up some diagrams.
I knew quite a few utilities for Linux and Windows, and of course the OpenOffice drawing tool, but all of those take quite a bit of work to create a diagram not only fast, but also beautifull.
After a bit of searching I encountered OmniGraffle and I played with it for a bit. Within 24 hours I bought it. It’s just great, drawing diagrams, using the auto-layout to apply different styles with a single mouseclick, and fine-tuning the looks by dragging and dropping styles from one object to another.
What I also found surprising is that the manual is actually usefull. It shows a beginner what is possible with OmniGraffle without too much work, and you can immediately try it out.
It is also a perfect tool for mindmapping; I never knew my thoughts were so interesting untill I saw them in colour:)
Some pictures of a simple mindmap, in order:
- Type in your thoughts, a simple map is drawn
- A single click switches styles and layout
- Drag a style (Lineair…) from the box on the right to the cloud to apply it
So, if you have some spare time, download omnigraffle and request a free 24 hour license (fully automatic). And have fun!
July 28th, 2007 at 10:33 am
Looks like a nice application.
Have you used Visio on Windows? If so, how does Omnigraffle compare to it?
July 28th, 2007 at 11:33 am
I have used an older version of Visio (Visio 2000), though not for very long.
Visio is not the same as OmniGraffle; they (seem to) approach drawing diagrams from different angles. OmniGraffle is very layout and presentation oriented, it is easy to make something fast that looks very good.
Visio seems to me a bit more oriented on the technical side;it’s not that hard to create a diagram, but making it look good is something else. I guess Visio is just a bit spartan for my use of diagrams, which is to illustrate a point.
There are quite some stencils available for OmniGraffle, and the pro version can do Visio 2002 import / export, though it can not map a network by itself.
I can only recommend trying it for yourself; there’s probably quite a lot what Visio can do and OmniGraffle can’t, but there’s nothing I miss in OmniGraffle.
July 30th, 2007 at 9:04 pm
I used to use Visio quite a bit and thought it was one of the best apps. Microsoft ever made (or bought and rebranded.) I didn’t think diagramming could be much more intuitive and yet still capable. Then I used Omnigraffle.
It doesn’t have all the developer tricks (reverse engineering, database diagramming etc.) of Visio but for everything else Omnigraffle is simply brilliant. I love how you can draw a diagram with your keyboard using an “outliner” style and the automatic alignment rulers are nearly prescient.
It took me even less than 24 hours to pay for Omnigraffle after starting the trial. Great app.
Omnioutliner is also very good.
August 8th, 2007 at 9:17 pm
I started using this at work a few weeks ago. When I worked with Windows I had to use Visio and while it did the job I found it was one of the buggiest applications I have ever used. OmniGraffle, so far, seems to work a treat. They offer a lovely range of handy applications that I only found from messing around with OmniOutliner which came with the system. I’ll keep going with OmniGraffle, certainly seems to be the best on offer at the moment.
September 6th, 2007 at 6:12 pm
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