OmniGraffle 3 Professional review

Fresh from its success at last year's Apple Design Awards, The Omni Group has released an update of OmniGraffle and OmniGraffle Professional.

OmniGraffle is a design application which is used to construct organisational charts, flow charts or other complex diagrams. OmniGraffle 3 adds a multitude of new features, while the Professional version provides a powerful toolset for advanced document manipulation and new presentation options.

One of the best features found in earlier versions was the minimalist, uncluttered interface that used a single Inspector palette containing sub-grouped tool sets. The approach is very different in version 3. Now all the main tool groups are enclosed within separate floating palettes that can be expanded or contracted.

Following Aqua interface conventions, each palette can be docked and positioned or hidden depending upon your preferred tool-set. The Professional version includes an option to save specific workspace settings that preserve the layout of palette sets depending upon the location you are in.

The new Smart Guides feature is designed to help you lay out documents more accurately. With Smart Guides turned on, when you move an object, distance markers pop up and alert you when it's going to form an equally spaced row or column based on the existing shapes within the document.

Horizontal and vertical lines are also shown when an object is perfectly aligned with other objects, or when you move an object to the centre of the page. If you are rotating or scaling an object, markers appear indicating when the rotation or scaling matches that of other previously drawn shapes. Smart Guides are powerful and match similar features found in high-end CAD software. Their addition means that you no longer have to rely on guesswork or OmniGraffle's grid to accurately position or resize objects.

Model behaviour

One of the biggest improvements to Omni Graffle is overall workflow within the program. The most significant addition is a Style and Selection Inspector. This new feature allows you to see precise details of the graphical styles that make up any shape in a document, from shadows and transparency settings to fill and stroke details. You can also view how many objects share the same graphic styles.

You can select a whole class of objects, and then make edits to that class in one go. This radically speeds up the editing process especially on large documents and also means you can rapidly adapt existing artwork to create entirely new looking documents in minutes. The Professional version also includes a pull-down menu inside the Tool bar that displays all the styles of objects that have been drawn inside the document. This feature makes it easy to recreate previously drawn objects even if someone else originally created them.

Another major feature of this upgrade is OmniGraffle's new Actions Inspector. Now any object can be set to link to a Web address, AppleScript or file, with the object becoming clickable when the program is in Browse mode. While this feature is a welcome addition, the Professional version makes full use of it. OmniGraffle Professional supports multiple page documents so you can create objects that link to different pages.

Professional also supports mouseless editing - allowing you to create graphics objects using the keyboard only. For better colour management and pre-press support, ColorSync is now supported.

Perhaps the most important feature of the Professional version is its ability to import and export native Microsoft Visio multiple page XML files. So far, OmniGraffle Professional is the only Mac diagramming application that supports Visio XML and this feature will significantly improve cross-compatibility, which was lacking in previous versions.