Anyone remember Aldus IntelliDraw? Some great features for OmniGraffle
 

When I was much much younger than I am today I had this amazing program on my pizza-box Mac LC called Aldus IntelliDraw 1.0. I could bore you with a story about how I won it at a MacExpo but I won't. ... This program was so great, and had tons of features I didn't see in such a sleek package again until OmniGraffle, such as anchored lines, loads of pre-defined shapes, presentation features, auto-align, etc...

It also had some kick-ass features that AREN'T in OmniGraffle that I would love to see:

* Symmetrigon: This was the single coolest feature for drawing nifty shapes. "The Symmetrigon creates symmetric objects with a variable number of reflection points. In other words, if you set the reflection points to 4, when you draw in one direction, the object mirrors at three other points. There's no easier way to draw multireflected shapes, such as stars or pinwheels."

* The ability to edit the pre-defined shapes once you place them on the canvas, and to convert any shape to bezier curve object (even text)

* But the pièce de resistance, the really crazy feature, was that you could apply addition and subtraction (like masking) to objects. Put a star over a circle and hit subtract, and you get the map symbol for a capital city. You could build the best shapes that way.

--simon

[QUOTE=sbwoodside]* But the pièce de resistance, the really crazy feature, was that you could apply addition and subtraction (like masking) to objects. Put a star over a circle and hit subtract, and you get the map symbol for a capital city. You could build the best shapes that way.

--simon[/QUOTE]
That's already in OmniGraffle Pro:

[img]http://homepage.mac.com/jtyzack/.Pictures/screenshots/OGaddsubshape1.jpg[/img]

[img]http://homepage.mac.com/jtyzack/.Pictures/screenshots/OGaddsubshape2.jpg[/img]

[QUOTE=JKT]That's already in OmniGraffle Pro:

[img]http://homepage.mac.com/jtyzack/.Pictures/screenshots/OGaddsubshape1.jpg[/img]

[img]http://homepage.mac.com/jtyzack/.Pictures/screenshots/OGaddsubshape2.jpg[/img][/QUOTE]

True, Jonathan, but the Boolean actions are still not as well implemented in OGP as they were in Intellidraw.

The other thing which sbwoodside doesn't mention was the amazing gradient maker, which allowed you to set any number ... I never tried to find out if there was a limit ... of intermediate colour points, so creating something like a spectrum was as easy as falling off a log!

I too was a great fan of the really nifty, tiny footprint drawing app, which disappeared off the map when Adobe took over Aldus ... or rather many of its features went into the development Illustrator where they got bloated and urecognisable. I've still got a copy on a zip disk, though I haven't used it for some time. When I move up to a MacBook Pro I might well keep this machine simply to be able to run it under classic if needed. To me, it was one of the really brilliant applications developed for System 8 ... like Word 5.1.
Mark

Wow, forget about Intellidraw ... but yeh, lots of cool features. That and Claris Impact were my two drawing packages for many years.

Wow, that's crazy, I totally didn't see that boolean feature in OGP. Talk about hidden in a menu ...

But as xiamenese says it's not really as good as Intellidraw because it doesn't create an editable bezier shape (I think that intellidraw always did that, although I'm not quite sure how that would have worked with circles).

As for gradients, I'm not too crazy about using gradients in my art anyway, they're kind of kitschy.

--simon

[QUOTE=sbwoodside]As for gradients, I'm not too crazy about using gradients in my art anyway, they're kind of kitschy.[/QUOTE]

I'm not an artist. But when I want to explain a cline to humanities students, particularly Chinese humanities students, to show that, with a continuum, the number of segments you divide it into is dependent on the measure you use, then having an image like a spectrum up on screen is very helpful. And it was very easy to produce a passably accurate one in Intellidraw; it's much more difficult in OG where you can't produce it as a single object with a gradient passing through multiple colour points. :)

Mark