omnigraphsketcher
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Omni Group commits to Mac App Store development
It should come as no surprise to anyone that the Omni Group has jumped aboard the Mac App Store train. Omni has long been a popular creator of Mac applications and has done pretty well for itself with the iOS apps that it has already released, with more on the way. On the day after the Back to the Mac event, Omni Group CEO Ken Case tweeted that the Mac OS X versions of all five of the company's Mac apps will also be available on the Mac App Store. That group includes the ever popular OmniOutliner, plus OmniFocus, OmniGraffle, OmniGraphSketcher, and OmniPlan. OmniFocus and OmniGraffle are already available for the iPad, with OmniGraphSketcher and the others promised soon. In all likelihood the vast majority of Mac developers will move into the App Store, with the likely exceptions of Adobe and Microsoft. For most developers, having an outlet built into the OS and avoiding the hassles of payment systems just seems like too good a deal to pass up. [via MacObserver]
Hands on with OmniGraphSketcher
Retailing for a relatively hefty US$14.99, OmniGraphSketcher may initially leave you scratching your head and wondering exactly who the app's target audience is. OmniGraphSketcher offers a free-form drawing application for creating graphs and charts. With it, you can illustrate many kinds of numeric information, just as you would by using the chart features in a normal spreadsheet. However, OmniGraphSketcher isn't powered by spreadsheets. It's powered by human drawing, and that's a rather odd combination; it's also the application's main feature. There's not a lot you can customize creatively when working with a standard spreadsheet graph. OmniGraphSketcher helps build persuasive illustrations that break the cookie-cutter sameness of pie-charts and bar graphs and hopefully brings design excellence to the table. This app isn't about mathematical precision, it's about beauty. You choose the axes, the labels, the drawing style, and so forth. Like OmniGraffle, most of the functionality is placed into a pair of modes (line drawing and filled drawing, which I used to create the graph at the top of this post). An inspector popover lets you customize how each feature is colored. The software is, clearly, first generation. I ran into a fair number of bugs both before and after Omni issued a bug-fix 1.1 release. Even now, you cannot easily move labels within a shape. I worked around this by creating separate labels and dragging them to where I wanted them to be rather than where the app wanted to put them. I could not order my objects back to front, but I realized that deleting a shape and undoing that action moved each shape to the front. (I initially drew the shapes purple, then red, then green, but wanted them ordered in the sequence you see above.) I admit readily that I'm an engineer, not an artist. (The picture shows this quite clearly.) While the idea of creating artistically enhanced illustrations appeals to me, I have no talent whatsoever to really make the most of this application. I'll stick with spreadsheets, I'm afraid. For anyone who does have that artistic spark, you may find that this application will help you build those persuasive graphics, even when you're on the go. %Gallery-91459%
Omni Group bringing the Omni apps to the iPad
Famed OmniFocus developer The Omni Group has given a brief peak at their development roadmap. The Mac Observer reports that Omni will release OmniFocus, OmniPlan, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner and OmniGraphSketcher for the iPad. The Omni Group is pretty excited about what all the iPad has to offer saying they feel that, like the original Macintosh, the iPad will be the computer for the rest of us. Omni has already begun porting OmniFocus and OmniGraffle for the iPad and will start working to bring their other products to iPad beginning in the next few months. Omni is being very candid about their plans for the future of their products and it is refreshing to see a well-known software company keep their users informed. Omni admits that the iPad work will delay future release cycles for the Mac versions of their software but is confident that this is the right decision. [via The Mac Observer]
