Naming stencil items - WHY can't we?
 

It's a simple idea and I don't understand WHY this feature hasn't been added by now in the most amazing graphic drawing application ever, my favorite, OmniGraffle.

As best I can guess, some key developer must be thinking that words are bad and you should just be able to tell one stencil item from another by glancing at the thumbnails in the stencil view. " If the thumbnail images are scaled just a bit larger maybe that will work..." WELL, IT DOESN'T.

Let's say, for example, that you have a stencil full of paragraph formats. You don't want to see a bunch of thumbnails with various scrawls. You want to see (hover, separate panel, whatever) "Body", "Comment", "Big Label", etc. Or let's say you have a UML symbol stencil. Many graphic elements look similar in thumbnail but are completely different. "Package - Doman", "Package - Subsystem", "Class - Local", "Class - Imported", etc.

But for some reason, possibly because it was easy to do - the only reason I can think of, there is a panel in Stencil view that tells us whether the current item is a GROUP or a RECTANGLE. Completely useless information. Seriously, guys...

My humble request then, is 1) make it possible to NAME your stencil items and 2) show that name for the selected item instead of RECTANGLE / GROUP.

What, am I the only person that wants this? ;)

You can do this pretty easily in OmniGraffle Professional using the Note & Data Inspector, that meta data will show in the lower portion of the Stencil Window.

Right, but here's the problem with that...
 

[QUOTE=Joel;69357]You can do this pretty easily in OmniGraffle Professional using the Note & Data Inspector, that meta data will show in the lower portion of the Stencil Window.[/QUOTE]

... unless I'm missing something. Let's say you create a "Note" and use that as the name. (in the "click to add note" area). Now I get my hover in the stencil panel, good.

BUT, now let's say I drag that item MANY times into a document. I now get this annoying hover when I move my mouse across my document. I only wanted it in the Stencil. Here's a good example of just how annoying this can be. UML stencil, item: Multiplicity phrase (1..*), let's say. Name "Multiplicity". Very useful for the stencil. Now I use that 50 times in my model drawing. And there are 50 annoying hover points in my drawing.

Is there a way to turn the hover messages off in my drawing, but leave them on in the stencil view? That might do the trick.