[JKT]

OG 4 beta 1 has been released to the public. If you use OmniGraffle, then you'll be pleased to know that this version is shaping up to be a fantastic upgrade. If you use OmniOutliner as well, then you'll really appreciate the new outlining tools in OG4 as they make mind mapping/brainstorming extremely easy. The addition of LinkBack support also means that you can use OG as a far more powerful drawing tool for objects in Keynote... There's far too much new stuff for me to write about, so instead here's the blurb from Joel Page of OmniGroup as posted to the OG mailing list:

Code:
It is my pleasure to announce the availability of OmniGraffle 4.0 beta 1, the first beta release of the next major revision to OmniGraffle.

OmniGraffle 4 represents some marked changes to the application, from very noticeable user interface changes to some new paradigms for quickly entering in data to create clean and efficient organizational charts and hierarchies. There are some new drawing tools altogether such as the new Magnet Tool, which allows arbitrary magnet creation and manipulation within the main document window to powerful enhancements to existing tools such as spline-based bezier controls for the Polygon Tool, now referred to as the Pen Tool, plus many many more.

Big Changes:

- Inspectors have now been consolidated into three primary groups: Style, Properties, and Canvas. Style contains those inspectors governing the appearance of an object, Properties holds those attributes that aren't necessarily visual, yet still pertain to objects alone, and Canvas deals with those settings that affect the document as a whole.

- Canvases and Layers have been merged into one area occupying a drawer off of the main document window, this allows the dragging and dropping of layers and canvases from one document to another. The Canvases section of the Utilities Drawer also contains a new feature, Master Canvases, which when applied to normal canvases will show their contents on the canvases that are dependent on the master canvas.

- The other half of the Utilities Drawer has a new feature, Outline view, which allows rapid entry of data by using the keyboard alone, showing hierarchical structure all the while mapping out the diagram dynamically in the main document window.  The lower portion of Outline view has access to Diagram Styles, which are a new way to instantly change the look and layout of any diagram.

- If keyboarding is not your thing, you can select a shape, and by Command-clicking on an empty portion of the canvas create a connected child to it, or by Option-Command-clicking an empty portion of the canvas create a sibling.

- You can now drag more than one object out of the Stencil Viewer to the main document window, and what's more is that object styles present in the Stencil Viewer will propagate to the Drawing Tools' drop-down menus, laying the groundwork for stencils to act as overall styles.

- The ruler now has controls for governing scale, such that you can easily specify one inch to equal one foot or one mile, you can even mix and match different unit types so that one millimeter might equal one foot, etc.

- To better facilitate the use of ruler scale, we've added some special text markup features to show X and Y position of an object, height, width, and line length for dimensioning. This same markup also handles handy header and/or footer information such as document name, canvas name, author, creation & modification date, page numbers and more.

- Custom shapes and connection lines can now benefit from user-specified corner radii for smooth rounded corners.

- We've added some boolean operations pertaining to combining, intersecting and subtracting shapes.

- Grouped objects now no longer need to be ungrouped to edit or manipulate the individual components of the group -- Click on the group to select it, click once more to select a component. This functionality also applies to...

- Tables. Create a shape, make it a table, drag the side handles to add rows or columns. Drag the corner handles to resize the table while maintaining the number of rows and columns.

- Import and export operations have been greatly enhanced, imported file types can either be added to an existing open document or they can create a new one; SVG export has been added, and you can now copy elements in the vector Pict format for use with Carbon applications such as Microsoft Word.

- The Drawing Tools can now be shown in a floating palette, or shown in the toolbar, see the Tools Palette preference pane for more options.

- LinkBack support is in place, find out more at http://www.linkbackproject.org/

Now that we've got your attention, here are the requisite warnings concerning OmniGraffle 4.0 beta 1:

WARNING: THIS IS BETA SOFTWARE. DO NOT USE THIS RELEASE FOR PRODUCTION WORK, YOU DO SO AT YOUR OWN RISK. PLEASE BACK UP ANY AND ALL WORK YOU INTEND TO TEST WITH OMNIGRAFFLE 4.0 BETA 1.

Additionally, it's recommended to set aside or backup your existing OmniGraffle preferences in order to start with a fresh set. Really, do this. It will help a lot.

If you have any questions, feedback, bug reports, etc. please just send them in to [email protected], make sure that the subject line has some reference to the beta release being used. I have any and all answers that you may need to know.

WARNING: MAC OS 10.3 IS REQUIRED TO RUN OMNIGRAFFLE 4.0 BETA 1.

WARNING: OmniGraffle 4.0 beta 1 is set to expire on June 30, 2005. You do not need to be a licensed user of OmniGraffle or OmniGraffle Professional to test this release.

Known issues:

- Performance issues concerning very large objects with shadows and the "throb" highlight effect when acting as a drag target are still being looked at.
- Temp folders are still being created on network shares at times when files are saved to those locations.
- AppleScript issues (mostly to do with the new features) are still not 100% completed.
- Some lines when connected to other lines can appear to have 'gaps' in their strokes.
- Some memory leaks, please keep in mind that those are generally the last to get fixed.
- 2-byte Unicode character input for Outline View has been worked on a great deal, those of you who may be interested in Japanese or Chinese or other Asian character sets should give this a close look.
- Mac OS X 10.4 compatibility testing is still ongoing.
- Localizations are not in place, so this release is English-only, sorry to say.
- Multiple monitor support has some odd quirkiness, in case the inspectors jump off screen, resetting their location addresses this.
- Resizing of tables created from auto-resizing text objects (such as the UML stencils) can lead to some odd display of the resize widgets versus the actual size of the table.
- Boolean operations (the Shapes submenu via the Edit Menu) are still very new and have some issues.

We're very much looking forward to your feedback, please keep in mind that it may take a little longer than usual for a reply due to the increase in support mail traffic that a release such as this tends to generate. While you wait for a response, take a look at the new online help via the Help Menu, our documentation will likely cover the broad issues that you may have.

The full set of release notes can be found at our Release Notes page http://www.omnigroup.com/application.../releasenotes/.

And now, the URL you've all been waiting for:

http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/4/

Enjoy!

- The OmniGraffle Team

[hmurchison2001]

Damn sexy if you ask me.

[Gee4orce]

How long before OG becomes a full-blown CAD program

Great update.

[threestain]

damnation. Got to upgrade again! DOn't even use it that much, but feel obliged to reward them for such good work!

[workerbee]

^ what he said.

[Catfish_Man]

Wow. Just wow. A beta update to a diagramming app capable of causing "kid in a candy store" mode in me is quite an accomplishment.

[cgc]

This is one heck of a spectacular product! Makes me wish I had a use for it other than ogling it.

[Gee4orce]

cgc, you can always find a use for an app this damned good, if you think hard enough

[:dragonflypro:]

Love OG, but the upgrade cycle is getting a little close.

Still, every release has been worth it.

Thanks Omni, (but, where is my OW 5.1 for Tig?…he he)

T

[radii_22]

Congratulations to Omni. Nice software. Hope they improve the stability of Outliner. Graffle is just awesome.

[gregomni]

Originally Posted by :dragonflypro:

Love OG, but the upgrade cycle is getting a little close.

Graffle 3 final was released on April 14, 2003. So it's been two years, one month, and thirteen days between major (pay to upgrade) releases so far. (And it will be even longer than that, since this is just a beta and not the final).

That's way too long as far as I'm concerned.

[cgc]

Originally Posted by Gee4orce

cgc, you can always find a use for an app this damned good, if you think hard enough

Oh yeah, I can diagram my attack plan for Ghost Recon. Where's my credit card?!!?!

[torifile]

Originally Posted by gregomni

Graffle 3 final was released on April 14, 2003. So it's been two years, one month, and thirteen days between major (pay to upgrade) releases so far. (And it will be even longer than that, since this is just a beta and not the final).

That's way too long as far as I'm concerned.

Has it been that long? Wow. I guess OO was just released recently (or more recently than 2 years). I wonder if this OG release obviates the need for OO? I'll have to try it out...

[ZXspectrum]

love that browser

[moonmonkey]

Originally Posted by ZXspectrum

love that browser

are you lost?

[USNA91]

Will I be able to print their diagrams in Word documents?

I haven't had much luck with this. They look like crap. It is my ONE gripe.

[gregomni]

Originally Posted by USNA91

Will I be able to print their diagrams in Word documents?

I haven't had much luck with this. They look like crap. It is my ONE gripe.

Unfortunately, Word can't handle PDF images correctly, which would be ideal. (It rasterizes the PDF instead of keeping it a vector.)

In OG4 we did try to improve this interchange quite a bit. We now provide a preview image for EPS export, which when imported into Word results in a decent vector representation. Unfortunately, Word doesn't look for EPS on the pasteboard, so you can't just copy and paste, you need to export from Graffle and import into Word.

Or, we also can now export and copy/paste as PICT, which is the old Mac OS vector image format (and the format that Word uses for its clip-art). This also results in a decent vector representation in Word, and looks decent when printed. The PICT format is old enough that it has several limitations (no gradients being the most obvious one that people seem to run into), so those parts will be turned into bitmap representations that are drawn into the PICT. The final issue is that if Word is given both TIFF and PICT on the same pasteboard, it chooses to use the TIFF representation, so if you want to get a PICT into Word you need to use the new Edit > Copy As > PICT command in Graffle 4.

Given the limitations of Word's vector formats and copy/paste handling, this is about the best that can be done, and it is vastly superior to Graffle 3 (where you need to export as a raster format like PNG with a high DPI in order to get good printed results from Word). I'd encourage you to send feedback to Microsoft that you'd like them to handle PDF pictures correctly, which would be both smaller in file size and more capable of maintaining image fidelity than either EPS or PICT.