OmniGraffle Pro

Kommentare: This application just gets better with each release, the developers really listen to what the users want and they have made a standard and pro model based on how much you want to spend and what features you need. As a a developer I find this easy to use to show ideas and create workflows or prototypes.

Vorteile: The ability to pretty much model or diagram anything you need from remodeling your house to building a new website. You can pretty much create any type of layout with real scaled models. The number of templates and icons within the app are good but the user base has created and shared a whole bunch of available templates for everything.

Nachteile: The newer versions with layering have made the learning curve a little steeper, it use to be a real simple app. The con is for you to make a presentable model you will have to spend some time in the app.

Vorteile: The design capabilities of OmniGraffle Pro are excellent. Multiple layers for objects, plenty of formatting options for text and graphic objects, and easy to use and create templates, are all hallmarks of this application. It's pretty easy to build a library of art that can be re-used, and it's relatively simple to share that library across multiple users. There are also a number of already-made libraries of graphic items that can be downloaded and used. I use this tool regularly for flow charting and process mapping for professional use, as well as some design work for personal use.

Nachteile: It would be nice to see some connectivity features added, perhaps something like a "web part" that could return a graph from Google Charts or data from another API.

Kommentare: OmniGraffle is marketed largely as an OS X native alternative to Visio, but it shines as a separate product in its own right, and a perfect accompaniment to Adobe CS for technical drawing. It's fine for all those Visio-ish things, org charts and information maps and whatever else, but I mostly use it for circuit diagrams and other 2-D technical drawings, and it works very well for these purposes.

Vorteile: Flexible units, canvas sizes, pen colors, objects, magnet positions, routing algorithms, etc.; it does pretty much anything you'd expect, and then some. The ability to specify double lines with outline and gap color is especially useful for my purposes: automotive wiring diagrams where wires often have a main color and one or two tracer colors. I also use OmniGraffle for diagramming fluid flow in fuel and cooling systems. It's great for all such symbolic diagramming.

Nachteile: Object libraries are a bit wanting, as are the tools for drawing custom objects (I prefer to draw custom objects in Illustrator, and import them). But that's about it.

Vorteile: I like pretty much everything about this software. It is easy to create flows and drawings for my projects. There are numerous stencils available online for download which improve my productivity.

Nachteile: I wish I could export directly to native Visio format instead of Visio XML for sharing files with clients.

Vorteile: For most "business"-related or academic tasks, you don't need Illustrator to make a quick schematic. It'd be overkill. And for most people, learning Illustrator is hard. To the contrary, OmniGraffle is specifically designed for making professional-looking, crisp vector graphics in a very intuitive and effortless way. Like other Omni Group products (e.g., the excellent OmniFocus task management software), OmniGraffle is robust and packed with features. But it's also user-friendly and easy to understand and use. It's the perfect choice for technical schematics, circuit diagrams, org charts, flowcharts, wireframe diagrams, etc.

Nachteile: I wish there were more high-quality free stencils in the Stencil Town marketplace. Most of the nice ones cost some money. This doesn't detract from the software at all -- you can create whatever you want from scratch -- but if you'd like to jump ahead and use some nice "clipart-style" vector graphics, you might end up spending a few bucks like I did!