[Snake Pot]

Hi folks,

Ok, so I needed some diagrams. I wanted to sit on the comfort of my sofa, put them together and then export 'em as PDFs for another document. All good. Lots of people say lots of nice things about OmniGraffle so despite it's abnormally high cost for a productivity application, I purchased it.

I'm off to a roaring poor start and I wanted to check that there is nothing that I'm doing wrong.

So far, I've had three crashes (mostly when double tapping in a shape to edit text labels) in a matter of... well, virtually no time. I'm also finding the thing to be extraordinarily slow. I've edited some highly complex documents in Pages on the iPad and it has always rocked and rolled performance wise... I find OmniGraffle unusable with just a few shapes. The diagram I'm wrestling with right now has less than 20 shapes in total and it is dragging to the point that I can't change the size of anything now.

In the exact case I'm in right now on the iPad, if I zoom and then select a shape, the whole thing hangs for several seconds. If I touch anything in the meanwhile, terrible things happen. In fact, whilst typing this, I double checked. One of my shapes has now rotated, changed size and moved to somewhere it is not meant to be. Pressing UNDO hangs the application for... tick, tick... 5 seconds.

I must say, at this stage, I am incredibly disappointed. I feel that the reviewers of this application must be using a version that I am not using. I do not understand how this is usable for anyone at all.

I do understand that one must pay good money for good applications which is why I shelled out the 30 pounds (by far the most expensive iPad application I have) for the thing. Ok, it's three bottles of reasonable wine so it's not exactly going to have me living on the streets if I write this off, but frankly, at this stage I figure I'd rather have had the three bottles of wine. I'm writing this in the hope that I'm doing something stupid and that there is a button, check box or some other option that I'm using that is slowing this down to an absolute crawl.

Help me, Omni-wan Kenobi, you're my only hope for avoiding severe buyer's regret.

[endoftheQ]

Hi Snake Pot

I'm afraid that I too wasn't exactly impressed with OmniGraffle on the iPad and, unlike the desktop version, decided against keeping it.

Omni offer a 30-day money-back guarantee, click this link for more details.

Sorry.

[whpalmer4]

Do you have trouble manipulating the sample documents, such as the coffee maker? That has more than 100 graphic elements, and I am able to manipulate the elements very smoothly, and undo my changes without any significant pauses. I would try rebooting the iPad (hold down the top button until you get the power-off slider, then slide it) to make sure the issue isn't due to a lack of available memory.

Use Contact Omni under the OMNI menu in the document chooser to contact them, and send along a copy of your document so they can see if there is something peculiar about it. They would probably also appreciate copies of the crash logs (they will tell you how to retrieve them).

[Brian]

Best thing to do would be to contact the support ninjas - off the top of my head, this sounds like a document and/or stencils imported from the Mac version are chewing up a bunch of resources. iPads are amazing pieces of hardware, but they do have much slower CPUs and much less RAM than most desktop machines.

Stuff can usually be adapted to work just fine on the iPad - here's an example - but a bit of tweaking is sometimes required. We're happy to help.