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The New Orthogonal Control Handle

Orthogonal lines have traditionally had a control handle at their midpoint for adjusting the 'dogleg' of the line where applicable, however that control would only move in one direction based on the layout.



The new control handle allows movement in both the X and Y directions, and provides for much more power when routing orthogonal lines.


(It's worth pointing out that without any interaction you will still get the traditional 'dogleg' between shapes unless you move the handle far enough away.)

The method winds up being fairly easy to understand; the line must route between both endpoints and through the handle with a minimum humber of segments. This means it's easy to get a line that goes from one side of a shape to the same side of another shape directly above or below without having to add midpoints.



You can also use the new Orthogonal line to get get perfectly horizontal and vertical lines between shapes without resorting to using magnets or faking it with the grid and not actually connecting the shapes.



Going Forward and How to Best Handle Legacy Documents

As stated at the beginning of the post, this new behavior is off by default. We wanted to ensure that the transition wasn't bumpy for anyone out there as well as maintain appearances for documents going back and forth between the Mac and the iPad. There will be a future release where the new line behavior is the default (there will still be the preference to switch back if desired).

We're aware that many of you use OmniGraffle for more illustrative purposes, where you may not want how a Curved line routes to change at all (it may be a path laid over a map, or just something that's artistic in nature). so we'd like to elicit your feedback as to how we should handle older files. Should we simply flag legacy documents and leave well enough alone? Perhaps converting older Curved line types to Bezier so that they look exactly the same?

We'd love to hear from you on this subject, so please chime in here.
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