Feb 12 2008
New features I’d like to see in OmniGraffle
I spent a great deal of time in Omnigraffle this year and last writing Form and Behavior specifications for websites and web applications. These documents contain a lot of text and a lot of diagrams – site maps, wire frames, widgets and so on. I used to use Omnigraffle to produce the diagrams, then export them for use in MS Word or PowerPoint. As I got to know Omnigraffle better, I started using it to create the whole specification, using the presentation functionality to present the spec and outputting to PDF for printed copies. But it’s not perfect, and I have a short wish list for things I’d like to see in the next version that’d make my life easier.
- Better text handling: Omnigraffle isn’t a text editor, but I’d really appreciate some improvements in how it handles text. Lists that work would be a good start. Lists don’t add new formatted lines as you write, probably because the application has no sense of styles attached to blocks of text. Lists are hard to find too. I was using Omnigraffle for over a year before I found the control for adding bulleted lists on the ruler. Not a good location for it. A better system for handling paragraph and heading styles would also be welcome, especially if it facilitated generating a table of contents.
- Components: I find myself drawing the same toolbar, footer, widget or whatever again and again throughout a set of wireframes. Now the smart thing to do is to draw one example and then reuse it by pasting it into a layer on other wireframes. The problem is that when one link on a toolbar changes, you need to go through the whole document to effect the change everywhere. On some projects, that eats up a lot of time. I’d like to be able to designate certain groups as components, so that a change in one instance is automatically applied to all instances. That would make life a lot easier.
- Richer actions: I wish Omnigraffle had a richer palette of actions. Currently, actions are essentially varieties of hyperlink, jumping you around between documents, canvases or URLs. It’d be great if Omnigraffle had actions that changed the properties of shapes, text and groups. This would enable me to simulate roll-overs and other application behaviours in clickable prototypes. Imagine if this were integrated with Applescript, so that we could script for simple behaviours in prototypes too. Sweet.
- Better variables: The variables in Omnigraffle are a good start, but there aren’t enough and they aren’t flexible enough. There may be a way to change the format of the date variable, but I haven’t been able to figure it out. A really good set of variables would release the true potential of master pages – for me the model for master page and variable functionality is Adobe FrameMaker. I recall turning out some fantastic templates in that application that automated lots of the little fiddly bits on a page. I’d love that sort of power in Omnigraffle.
There you go, I told you the list was short. I’d be interested to know if anyone else has anything to add to this list. Finally, I know that Omnigraffle 5 is well on the road to release and I haven’t looked at the feature set yet. Now that I have written my wish list, I may go over and take a peek. Fingers crossed that I’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Update
Just had a look over at the feature list on Omnigraffle 5 beta, and we have a few hits:
- “There is a new action in the Action Inspector to show, hide, or toggle visibility of any given number of layers.” This will enable simple animations simulating state changes without using multiple canvases. Not all that I had wished for but a very welcome addition and a good start.
- “Instead of using Master Canvases, OmniGraffle Professional 5 now has Shared Layers instead … Changes made to any shared layer dynamically propagate to all instances of the shared layer.” This looks like components, I’ll download the beta just to check this out. Woohoo!
Not on my wish list, but most welcome given that many of my colleagues are still stuck on WinDoze:
- “OmniGraffle Professional 5 now has a built in parser to convert the binary Visio file format (VSD) to XML for import. Visio stencils (VSS) and Visio templates (VST) are supported.”
