The Evolving Worker

I’m always looking for tools that make things easier in my day at work, like password managers, tools to find free space on your disk or such things.

It’s almost obsessional, but I believe it’s a good thing. OmniGraffle is one of these tools – it’s a pretty neat charting tool, designed for Mac OS X only.

An example of diagram created with OmniGraffle

This diagram describing user states in a web application took a few minutes to complete.

I have to create such diagrams quite often as part of my job as freelance developer. Therefore I appreciate how easy it is to copy styles, to create gradients and to handle color and styling in general. As well, I like the smart magnetic guides that help you to place things around without taking too much time.

The feeling of use is quite similar to the one you can get by using mind-mapping software. In fact, I tend to use OmniGraffle and Mind-Mapping in a complementary fashion now (see what can you do with mind-mapping for some real use cases).

Things I tend to use OmniGraffle for in real-life

I’ve been using OmniGraffle Pro in the following situations in the last few weeks:

• brainstorming and illustrating state-machines
• designing workflows (what happens when the user clicks here ? under which conditions ?)
• quick prototyping of web pages (using the yahoo design stencils extension for instance)
• nice-looking diagrams in general
• quick buttons for web development (like the buy now button on this page)

If you’re using Mac OS X at work and have to create diagrams, I recommend giving it a try.

More about OmniGraffle features – and how to test-drive it

You can find a detailed list of features on the OmniGraffle website as well as a trial working a few days (long enough to get the general feeling).