[Chris Crawford]

Thanks, John, for clearing that up for me.

I wonder, is this good design? OmniGraffle is so elegant in its user interface; this arrangement seems like Laurel & Hardy at the Grand Ball. Should the system be reversed: simply clicking on the tool resets the Inspectors, while Option-Clicking preserves the existing Inspector arrangement. Is there any reason why a user would want to preserve the Inspector settings while changing tools?

The user of Option-clicking is another questionable act. It's dangerous because it's invisible; the only way to learn about it is to scour the manual. I did read the entire manual at one point, but the problem with manuals is that you read the information long before you need it, and such information seldom sticks in the mind. I cannot think of any situation in which I would recommend Option-clicking. If I had to use Option-clicking, I would at the very least describe the function in the tooltip. There's no law of user interface design requiring tooltips to be terse.

Food for thought. And thanks again for straightening me out.