[Bill Van Hecke]

Hi Stokestack,

Thanks very much for your feedback. I hope I can shed some light on why things are the way they are in OmniGraffle.

Originally Posted by Stokestack

After updating to the latest version and loading a large diagram, I spent a few minutes looking for the Zoom control. Nothing in the toolbar, and the + and - keys didn't do it. Neither did the mouse wheel (eventually I found mention of the Command key usage in another post). Nor was there a context menu.

There's a zoom control in the lower-right of each document window; that's probably the easiest way to get to a particular zoom level.

In the future, you may find it useful to use the Help menu's search field to find menu commands; when I search for "zoom" in OmniGraffle 5, several relevant menu items and help topics appear.

Originally Posted by Stokestack

Turns out a bunch of controls are buried under a frame-advance symbol arbitrarily placed in the middle of the tool strip in the toolbar. Why? The entire expanded collection (including the weird arrow) is less than 700 pixels across. Is someone running this on a 640x480 laptop from 1992? And who deemed Zoom an obscure control?

I'm on a MacBook Air, here, and I find it pretty useful to be able to collapse the tools, especially on a small document. I have quite a few other buttons, so sometimes they fall off the right side of the toolbar and I need to shrink the tools list down to the first five items. Since I rarely use the tools on the right side of the arrow, I often just leave them collapsed.

The zoom keyboard shortcuts, the pop-up in the lower-right of the document window, and the z hot key keep me from needing to click the Zoom tool very often.

Originally Posted by Stokestack

I finally found the toolbar configuration in Preferences, but these controls shouldn't be buried by default. And I applaud putting this in Preferences instead of just relying on the somewhat obscure (Mac-standard) method of right-clicking on the toolbar, but that method should also be supported.

You can always customize the toolbar by choosing Customize Toolbar from the View menu, or by Command-Option-clicking the show toolbar button in the very upper-right of the window. But the order and hot keys for the individual items inside the tools palette are a little bit more involved than the standard Customize Toolbar sheet, so we needed to add our own settings in Preferences.

By the way, if you use the Zoom tool a lot, you can drag it in that list to before the separator. In fact, if you don't want the separator at all, you can drag it to the end of the list and it'll go away completely. A little bit of a hidden trick, but it works!

Originally Posted by Stokestack

I then spent too much time poring over the inspector in an attempt to change the size of the text inside a shape. There's offset and rotation, and a multitude of other arcane adjustments, but no size. This is particularly troubling when you consider that OmniGraffle still, after all these versions, DOESN'T RESIZE TEXT WITH SHAPES.

Since Apple provides its own Font panel, we decided to keep our hands off of those settings and let people use the standard panel. You can get at it by clicking the "A" button on the Text inspector, or by hitting Command-T. You can also always use the Command-Plus and Command-Minus shortcuts that are common in many apps to change text size. Having said that, we are looking into adding controls to our own inspector for some of the common font settings in a future version.

Originally Posted by Stokestack

What is up with the text not resizing with the shapes, anyway? Seriously, what could possibly trump that flaw when setting enhancement priorities?

I think I understand the utility of resizing text with an object, but to tell the truth, we don't hear a whole lot of requests for it. I think that a lot of folks prefer to have a consistent set of text sizes across their document (for instance, the traditional typographical scale including point sizes 12, 14, 16, 18, 21, and so on) rather than many various sizes resulting from minor resizing of objects. In the latter case, you could end up with five adjacent objects, each with its own slightly-different point size: 12, 12.3, 12.75, 13.1, 13.2. For many diagrams, it's the meaning of the objects, not the particulars of where the lines break or how the text flows inside the objects, that's important.

And, of course, that's setting aside the (very common) case where someone is resizing an object because they need more space to type; having the text get bigger would be quite frustrating!

Having said all that, it's possible that we're just not thinking of the same kinds of uses that you are. Can you give us an example of a diagram where you need the text to resize with the object? That might help us figure out why it's bothering you so much. The only cases I can think of are more illustrative than the type of stuff OmniGraffle is really meant for.

Thanks very much for your feedback!