[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.

[Brian]

Craig, thanks for posting - happy to help as much as I can. See below for the limitations of my help. ;-)

Originally Posted by craigp

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.

Is this happening in a brand new document, or one brought over from the Mac? Are there any custom stencils installed? The kind of performance you're getting isn't what we consider typical, and if there's anything we can do about this, we'd like to do so.

One of the difficulties of developing the iPad apps was the fact that Apple didn't announce any hardware specs before shipping the device. OmniGraffle 1.1 includes some memory optimizations that we made after getting our hands on actual hardware. (Turns out an iPad has as the same amount of RAM as an iPhone 3GS does, and doesn't have any sort of virtual memory system in place.)

We can't promise that every document or stencil from the Mac will work on the iPad, but we want to get as many as possible working there. If we can tweak something in the app or offer suggestions, we'd be very interested in doing so.

Originally Posted by craigp

However, [the] controls feel very hidden away.

We did (as you noted) try to stick pretty close to Apple's UI suggestions and the approach they took in their iPad apps. I think they considered some sort of sidebar, but took this approach when they saw how much space was left for content. Caveat: I'm not on the Graffle or UI teams; any or all of the above may be wrong. :-)

One thing I know for sure, though - the current versions of these apps are the start of the race, not the finish line. If a lot of customers tell us that the current approach isn't working, we'll think about how to change it.

Originally Posted by craigp

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.

This would be very cool to have in the app; doing it in a way that supports all the shapes that folks might draw was too tricky for the launch deadlines, though.

The workaround I'd suggest would be to use the Shapes panel to convert a freehand shape into whichever of the built-in shapes you feel is the best match...

Closing note: We collectively browse the forums as we're able to do so, but we can't guarantee that folks from a given team will be able to respond to every post. As I mentioned, I'm not on the Graffle or UI team, so you may want to send an email to the OmniGraffle Support Ninjas.

Their Graffle-Fu is stronger than my own, so they may have suggestions I didn't think of...

[craigp]

Thanks for your reply Brian. Really appreciate it.

I would love to enter into some kind of dialogue with the Graffle bods, if my experience would help to improve the product in the future. I can send over samples of my documents. As far as I know, I'm not using stencils.

Maybe I could record some actual usage showing the performance, or something.

I didn't realise the hardware limitations were as tight as you mention. Not much wiggle room there, eh?

I'll send an email over to the support guys.

Thanks again for your help.

[Chazz]

My experience has been similar to this poster. So you can be assured there are at least 2 users who feel the same way. If there are 2 then there must be more.

[whpalmer4]

As suggested elsewhere, when you have performance issues, a good step is to send Omni a copy of the file so they can determine if the issue is something particular to your setup or usage, or you are pushing the limits of what the app can handle. My experience with what appears to be the most ridiculously overgrown OmniFocus database reported on the forum is that they are very responsive about addressing the performance issues I bring up, some of which may hardly be noticeable with a more typically sized database.

[bobfet1]

I agree with all the points of the original poster. I especially would like to see more development on the third point, because that is really how I want to use this app on the iPad. I'd like to quickly sketch something out with my finger and have omnigraffle recognize what I'm drawing and translate that into something more clean looking for wireframing.