Product Reviews

OmniGraffle may be best known as a diagramming and charting tool, but with illustrators and interface designers among its fans, it's not a tag that does the program full justice. Judging by what's on offer in OmniGraffle 5, this upgrade should open the application to an even wider constituency.

Like previous versions, OmniGraffle 5 is available in both Pro and Standard versions - and built on an entirely new layout engine, Graphviz. The reasoning is that Graphviz makes it easier to create automatic layouts based on lists and relationships. In practical terms, the only difference you will see is a widening of the existing automatic document layout options to include circular and radial layouts. Otherwise, drawing feels much the same.

But there are some big changes to user interaction. The Inspector palette has provided the backbone of OmniGraffle since its earliest days but though still vitally useful, things are more flexible now. For example, with the Ruler display active, you'll see some common Inspector controls such as object size, location, fill and stroke duplicated in a new mini Inspector at the top of each window. Object styles, formerly a Style Inspector option, now appear in a style tray at the bottom of the window, from where they can be dragged on to canvas objects to apply those settings to them. These changes may disorientate old hands but new users - particularly those with smaller screens - will appreciate it.

Another casualty of the move to version 5 is the Utilities drawer, which previously organised a document's outline and canvases. Now canvases can be selected from the Canvases sidebar, while Outlines - where you sketch the relationships of a diagram in an hierarchical view - appear in the Outline sidebar. Both are easily retractable, using buttons on the program's much smarter toolbar. Again it's a much neater solution once you're used to it.

The revamped Stencil library can be searched now and links to an online repository for user-contributed stencils. The best part is

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that not only can it download stencils from inside the Stencil library but also install them from here, saving time.

OmniGraffle has always been a great way to build illustrations thanks to its library of prebuilt shapes that you can drag on to the main canvas area and join with connection lines that remain attached to objects as you move them. Well, Connection lines can now sport Bézier controls, which makes it much easier to produce accurate curved connecting links.

The more expensive Pro version boasts two new features that will sorely tempt upgraders. The first is subgraphs that let you group objects and collapse them to a single object, still retaining all its links. You can restore the group to its original state either through a contextual menu command or through the Outline sidebar.

This really makes a difference when handling larger, complicated hierarchies. In the past most users would have fallen back on the Outline drawer or an outlining application to manage large diagrams. Now it's possible in the main canvas.

The second big change is the replacement of master canvases with shared layers. The contents of these can be shared with any other layer just by dragging the shared layer over it. Changes to the latter are automatically propagated to all other copies of it - much more flexible than master layers.

A further unquestionable improvement is far better importing of the near-ubiquitous Microsoft Visio files. Past versions could open Visio files saved in XML format - now you can open native Visio (VSD) files, stencils and templates directly. We opened several such files without a hitch. Interaction doesn't quite work both ways - you can export only in Visio XML format - but this will be a huge deal for anyone trying to switch from Visio.

Also new in the Pro version is the custom data in the Notes Inspector. In OmniGraffle Pro, Notes are a way to store and display information on objects in a diagram and can be styled, shared with OmniOutliner and include hyperlinks. Notes are displayed when you rest the mouse pointer over an object. In addition, the new Custom Data table allows you to store details about the object in a table format.

OmniGraffle is a superb application at an excellent price. As for OmniGraffle Pro, it may look expensive at first but the huge improvements make it worthwhile. However, there is one caveat: both programs require Leopard. There are obvious programming benefits in this approach but it's bad news for those individuals and businesses stuck on earlier Mac operating systems. Perhaps it's time to chart an upgrade path.