Comments on: OmniGraffle – Drawing Sofware for your Mac

By: Alternative to Visio for creating visual sitemaps - Irish SEO, Marketing & Webmaster Discussion

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 17:12:05 +0000

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By: katie

katie — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 20:17:15 +0000

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.

By: Paul M. Watson

Paul M. Watson — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 20:04:14 +0000

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.

By: Leon

Leon — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 10:33:37 +0000

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.

By: Cormac

Cormac — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 09:33:54 +0000

Looks like a nice application.
Have you used Visio on Windows? If so, how does Omnigraffle compare to it?