Grafflebaffle
Published by peter February 19th, 2007 in osx, software development.Ever since I received my Macbook Pro I’ve been thinking about which software to run for drawing diagrams (which is something I have to do quite often). I’m not talking elaborate UML diagrams, ‘conceptual’ drawings… the stuff you would typically use a whiteboard for. One of the few applications I used to use Windows (in vmware, on Linux) for was MS Visio, a fantastic application!
Since doing the above in a legal way involves buying expensive Windows / Visio® licenses I decided to have a look at the OSX counterpart: OmniGraffle as ‘recommended’ by some other OSX developers.
After trying the demo I was sold. The use of the quartz graphics engine makes the application actually fun to work with (mind you, I’ve drawn tons of diagrams in Java based UML tools like MagicDraw and Poseidon) and to huge amount of free stencils on top of the build-in ones are just great!
Next to the above OmniGraffle Professional has some other greate features like Visio® 2002 XML import/export and a presentation mode (fullscreen with element highlighting, nice touch!)
Today I switched from demo to a professional license… and just have a look at the diagrams (from my current project) I redrew for testing the full application:
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note: I’m not in any way (I’ve checked linked in, nearest is a 3rd connection) affiliated to the omnigroup
Good news, you should have listended erakier
!
Erakier….? Well that’s a new word for me
I presume (due to context en quite high correlation value) it’s a mistyped version of earlier?
Aahh, I see a pattern here! You told me something again… and I only responded to the errors I noticed!
The problem with the fact that you mentioned it earlier was that one of my other ’superiors’ told me he had a look at it and almost directly discarded it due to the lack of certain (yet to be disclosed) features.
Have you guys tried http://gliffy.com/
a nice web2.0 solution
Gliffy looks cool! I’ve tried to draw some diagrams, but after adding a couple of elements the interface started to lag… also I couldn’t find any layouting tools (distribute shapes, align shapes, layout tree/organically), multipage printing, import/export to various formats… (the stuff which can make a diagram editor a _good_ diagram editor).
None the less, thanks for pointing it out…. nice tool!