[craigp]

Hey guys,

I'm a long-time user of OmniGraffle for the Mac. Been using it in a professional capacity for user experience design for a major commercial application for years now.

So, I was overwhelmingly excited when I heard OmniGraffle was coming to the iPad. I had visions of being in workshop sessions sketching rough wireframes on the iPad and importing these directly into OmniGraffle on my Mac to finish. Or taking full wireframes from my Mac to show other people and tweak live on the iPad - without having to print or export them to PDF first to get them in front of people.

After finally getting my hands on an iPad and hurriedly downloading OmniGraffle as my first app, I quickly realised that I wouldn't be using it for any of these things.

I realise that the time given to the OmniGraffle team to bring the iPad version out was very limited. I'm in awe of what you were able to achieve in a limited period of time.

I'm just not sure the time was spent on the right features.

Firstly, I have a problem with the performance. Trying to edit even a relatively simple wireframe, I find that there are more than a second delays between most functions. Pinching and zooming operations seem incredibly hit and miss (maybe due to the application actually being hung from a previous operation, and not responding to my action). Similarly, double-tap to edit text - or even single tap to select - doesn't always respond in the same way.

This lag between what I want to do and what's actually happening is constantly interruptive. It breaks my train of thought and makes me feel like I'm fighting with the app.

Secondly (as I mentioned before), I'm in awe of the features that you were able to bring across. The majority of object editing functions are available - giving me the range of commands I need.

However, these controls feel very hidden away. OmniGraffle is a top-tier mature professional app with a broad range of controls. I realise this may be a contradiction of Apple's iPad UI guidelines, but using the same metaphor as (for example) the iPad mail app and handling the range of actions in a popup bubble panel means I have to drill-down and drill-down to find the one option I'm after. Wouldn't it have been better to lay the functions out in a static left-hand or bottom panel that requires no drill-down at all? Maybe even give me an option to customise these static panels so I can put 80% of the controls I use all the time in one place. Make the panel easy to hide if I want to go full screen - give me a dedicated presentation mode when I need to show someone something.

Thirdly (and lastly, I promise), I think a trick has been missed by not providing a tool to take finger drawing input and tidying it up. Drawing a box or line with your fingers is quite tricky. The freehand drawing tool is fine, but there are many other apps that offer that functionality for free. I want OmniGraffle to be able to understand that I'm trying to draw a box, and make it a box with right angles and straight edges. Understand I'm drawing a circle and make it perfectly round.

Exploiting what must be one of the iPad's primary benefits (direct touch input) seems to me obvious to me, but this one major feature seems to have been overlooked.


Hey. Look. This has turned out longer than I wanted. But I hope it shows how much I love your software and just hoped for something more with OmniGraffle for iPad.

Could anyone from OmniGraffle comment on any of these points?

Thanks for your time.

A hopeful customer.