V6 How to liberate inspectors from the document window?
 

Still working through the new features, but one item has immediately disturbed me - I hate the pinned inspectors inside the document window! Is there a way to float the inspectors and tear off independently as in previous versions? Working on a 2 monitor setup is awful with inspectors pinned inside the window!

I came here with the same question. They are so large you really need to move them to a second monitor. This is a major step backwards in "Pro" usability. I have two monitors, let me use them!

It looks as if the inspectors were pinned down during the pre-iOS7 period of rather obtrusive and ornamented (baroque) UI which shaped the first OF2 re-skinning.

( If you look at the video on [url]http://www.omnigroup.com/omnigraffle/#whats-new-in-omnigraffle-6[/url] you can see that the OG6 inspectors started off with the same flickering mouse-over ornamentations – concealing disclosure triangles – as OF2 draft 1 )

Perhaps Apple's move towards foregrounding workspace and data (and making UI less self-promoting) will now facilitate a clearing of the OG6 workbench, with inspectors moveable to adjacent monitors.

I always found the OG inspectors to waste way too much screen real estate and was hoping they'd redesign them so they would be more compact and take as little space as e.g. Apple's Keynote.app inspectors.

Now with v6 they got even larger! But that's not all I cannot even move them out of the way!
Not everyone is working on a 30" screen all the time, this is really making things worse.

We have the same with the layers/canvas inspector. That thing was never very space saving, now they just made it larger and take more space than ever. UI wise OmniGraffle is a big pain in the neck now. What a shame.

Also the idea of keeping height/width and coordinates for top and left corner of an object not grouped vertically but horizontally is a very bad one. Human perception always gives preference to vertical grouping and especially since the vertical space between the values is less than the horizontal space the inspector for these numeric values is a bad mess and really works against human perception.

Doesn't look like peel off is option? However I did discover you can open stencils (only) in its own inspector although not that intuitive to get there.

If click into a set of stencils then right click little prefs cog in inspector you can open them in a new window and navigate up and down all stencils in that dedicated stencil inspector window (while still using main panel inspector for other format needs etc)

Holy moley, the sidebar and inspectors now take up almost half of the 1440x900 screen real estate I have available. A significant proportion of that appears to be wasted dead space between UI elements as well. Not thrilled about that.

It's a little frustrating when OmniGraffle is your bread and butter and there's no beta test. Yet you see OmniFocus and OmniOutliner meticulously and widely beta-tested. I follow the blog. I didn't see any such announcement for OG.

From the forum I gather there was a private test, a couple users talking about issues with various builds, etc. Must have been a pretty small group not to see all of these problems.

But here we are, too late for comment. It's shipped.

[QUOTE=realbrick;127604]It's a little frustrating when OmniGraffle is your bread and butter and there's no beta test. Yet you see OmniFocus and OmniOutliner meticulously and widely beta-tested.[/QUOTE]

What’s worse amongst the people using OmniGraffle there are probably a ton of UI designers, so they’d place it under much more scrutiny than the other apps. OmniGroup should have really tested the new UI with some of their users first and not just impose it upon us.

[QUOTE=stevensby;127505]Still working through the new features, but one item has immediately disturbed me - I hate the pinned inspectors inside the document window! Is there a way to float the inspectors and tear off independently as in previous versions? Working on a 2 monitor setup is awful with inspectors pinned inside the window![/QUOTE]

I agree. I use two/three monitors and also Macbook Air with a tiny screen. Pinned Inspector is too large and can't be separated from main window. May you allow user to choose between floated or pinned inspector as before (Omnigraffle 5)?

Dang. This is not the news I'd hoped for. One of the things I like best about using multiple monitors is having one as a workspace for the data and the other as a tool space for the commands, such as the inspectors. That all goes away and impinges upon my ability to work on larger documents now that inspectors and whatnot are glued to the document window. :(

Agreed. I'm not sure why they thought this strange bit of inflexibility was a good idea; It's seems more like just changing something for the sake of "refreshing" it. This is a big deal, given how much screen real estate OG now wants. Can we have some input from Omni on if there is a plan to add flexibility back and at what priority?

Thanks,
Brian

This has become really saddening to me. Luckily I installed the trial before buying, but it made me lose hope in any future with OGP. It's getting to the point where I need to decide if its worth continuing to use the deprecated 5.4.4 or cut my losses and move back to Illustrator as my primary tool. It's bad enough that Apple is de-professionalizing its "Pro" products, but my favorite apps too?

Please don't make me go back to Illustrator. =(

Agreed/ I've been waiting for a fix before an upgrade.

The tool election is somewhat cleaned up. Yet most of the sidebar is wasted empty space, the tool bar is twice as wide and takes a whole vertical column.

The canvases side bar is also huge. It is taking 3 times the width with all kinds of information, when all I want is page preview.

On my 24" monitor, only a little more than half of the screen is left to drawn in.

We're planning to offer the option to separate the inspectors from the document window, as I noted in a related thread:

[QUOTE=Ken Case;129560]Integrating the inspector into the main window was one of the design goals for OmniGraffle 6, making it easier to work with OmniGraffle on small laptop screens. Many of our customers have told us they really appreciate this change.

That said, we've also heard feedback from people in this thread that it makes some workflows harder, and we do plan to offer an option in a future release which would let you separate the inspectors from the document window.

But this isn't a trivial change; it's a fairly big undertaking that will be delivered as a feature in a version 6.x major update, not a bug fix for a version 6.0.x maintenance release.[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=Ken Case;129579]We're planning to offer the option to separate the inspectors from the document window, as I noted in a related thread:[/QUOTE]

Thanks Ken for the reply. This is one of the reasons I and my team are holding back on upgrading our licenses to V6. As soon as this is updated we'd be happy to update.

On a side note, please could you look into adding auto-propagating stencils into a future release? I've added a post here on the subject: [url]http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=31238[/url]

Many thanks