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"The Omni Group Ships OmniGraffle 2.0, Announces Free Upgrade" For Immediate Release Seattle, Washington -- April 1, 2002 -- The Omni Group today shipped version 2.0 of OmniGraffle, the symbolic drawing program built specifically for Mac OS X. Version 2.0 adds a passel of new features, including the addition of layers, handy new drawing tools and modes, embedded hyperlinks and more web export options, incredibly rich AppleScript support, editable magnets on shapes, a much more advanced and faster layout panel, and the first of some beautiful new object palettes that really show off how diverse a program OmniGraffle really is. Plus we threw in a bunch of performance enhancements and bug fixes, because, well, there were some slow spots and bugs in 1.0. (But not 2.0, it's perfect in every way.*) More information and a free trial download are available at http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnigraffle/. Amazingly, the upgrade is free to registered users of OmniGraffle 1.0. FREE! Read the first paragraph again, you can't believe it, can you? Even though it's April 1st, this isn't a prank. (But please do see our separate press release, "The Omni Group announces it has contracted Russian space agency to send the rest of N'Sync into space, as well.") We decided to be generous on this upgrade to reward all of OmniGraffle's early adopters, who believed in us (-sniffle!-), put up with the minor difficulties in version 1.0, and have been so helpful with their gentle suggestions for what should go into the 2.0 version (eg: "Speed it up, chowderheads!"). But don't get too used to this, you'll be paying for 3.0. (Sorry, we've got to make some money here.) The free upgrade even includes everyone who has received or will receive a free version of OmniGraffle as part of Apple's pro machine bundle. Ken Case, Omni's Director of Engineering states, "I can't believe Kevin has released two major versions of OmniGraffle and I still haven't gotten the OmniWeb update out." Wil Shipley, President of Omni added, "I have nothing to say here because I'm writing this press release, so, in a sense, all these words are my quotes." What is OmniGraffle? OmniGraffle is a new kind of drawing program that lets you draw with symbols instead of doodling freehand, like Adobe(R) Photoshop(R), or plotting curves, like Adobe(R) Illustrator(R). While both of those are great programs (and we own and use them both at Omni), they are intended to help artist create art, while OmniGraffle is designed to help you lay out your ideas, play with them, and then show them to other people. For this purpose other drawing programs have two major drawbacks: they require that you have artistic talent, and they aren't really designed to let you play with ideas visually; moving objects around willy-nilly and changing entire classes of them at once. With all this hand-waving you may be thinking, "But what would I actually USE OmniGraffle for?" To which we'd respond, "Hey, don't end a sentence with a preposition." But after that we'd say that you can use OmniGraffle to draw out anything that can be represented by symbols and lines: you can use it to lay out office furniture in a new building, draw a network diagram, make a flow chart, map where files are supposed to go on your hard disk, chart how glucose molecules are processed during digestion, make a family tree, draw up an org chart, plot out your database's ER design, rough out a screenplay... if you've ever had to draw something on a whiteboard, chances are good you could have drawn it clearer, prettier, faster, and more clearly using OmniGraffle. And you would have been able to save it for later and share it on the web, too. OmniGraffle is often compared to Visio(R), which gives people a decent idea of our genre, but there are obvious differences between the two: many people have told us OmniGraffle is a lot more fun and easy to use, and thus useful, but on the other hand Visio has more modes for accomplishing some specific kinds of tasks. Visio also costs about four times as much, appears to be aimed only at business types, and doesn't run on Macintoshes. (So nyah.) What's Cool About This Release in Particular? Layers: Can be created and you can set whether to lock, hide, or print them on a new Info pane. New drawing tools and modes: additions include (but not limited to) new rubber-stamp tool, zoom tool, polygon tool, link browser tool, new line endings for ERD and IA, plus new drawing options like graded fills, tiled images, and partially transparent images (this last added at the behest of a certain Apple V.P.). See the release notes for an exhaustive list, it's huge. AppleScript: You can install scripts to control OmniGraffle and they will automatically show up in its menu and in the "Customise Toolbar" panel, so any script can be put on your toolbar (with a custom icon, even). Any AppleScripts can also now be attached to diagram objects; they execute when the object is clicked. For example, we have used this to create a simulator that shows the flow of electricity throw various gates, written entirely in AppleScript. Finally, you can also copy any shapes you've drawn as AppleScript commands, and then paste those commands into a text editor to see the exact AppleScript you'd need to use to recreate those shapes. This is great for creating live documents: first draw out how you want things to look, then copy them as AppleScript, then add the code to make them live, and voila! We used this to make a little AppleScript that can take an OmniOutliner file and make a graphical calendar of events in it using OmniGraffle. Embedded hyperlinks and more web export options: You can attach hyperlinks to web sites or to local files to any shape, and then if you lock the shape clicking on it will open the link. To show off the power of this, we've also included support to drag frameworks and Project Builder files into OmniGraffle, it then automatically creates a hierarchy of classes, lays them out, and links each one to the actual source file, so when you click on a class its file is opened in Project Builder. Image export is much improved, and we've added the ability to output an OmniGraffle document as an HTML image map, which makes it one of the easiest ways to create image maps in existence. Magnets: Can be edited on a per-shape or per-group basis now, using a new Info pane. Advanced and faster layout panel: Doing a layout now brings up a progress sheet, and you can cancel long layouts. Force-directed layout now has magnetic fields to help prevent overlapping lines. Hierarchical layout allows you to set rank assignments on objects so they lay out consistently, and allows you to pick from more directions (right-to-left, bottom-to-top). New Palettes: The first of our free new palettes, "Office Layout," full of beautiful, fully resizable furniture which are all to scale with each other, and "Network," full of all kinds of networking gadgets and computers, including a really pretty Apple G4 Cube. For a bunch more detail into what's changed, visit http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/releasenotes/. OmniGraffle Licensing and Pricing: OmniGraffle can be downloaded and used as a free OmniGraffle viewer. You can also use OmniGraffle in unlicensed mode to do anything you want to any number of documents with less than twenty items in them, so you can get a feel for how the program works, draw some graphs, play with the animated layout, and get comfortable with the application. Once you've used OmniGraffle for a while, we bet you'll want to edit documents with more than twenty items, and then you can buy a license to fully enable the app. System Requirements: Mac OS X version 10.1.3. Information about The Omni Group: The Omni Group, forged in 1993 from courage, righteousness, and raw steel, develops Mac OS X applications including OmniWeb, OmniGraffle, and OmniOutliner; ports games to Mac OS X because really, what's a platform without games; and employs a bunch of unique individuals who all agree that "Andy Richter Controls the Universe" is the best show on television, at least until Fox cancels it. More information on The Omni Group is available at http://www.omnigroup.com/company/, including a bunch of pages where we spout our manifesto for being good people and writing good software, if you're into that touchy-feely stuff. __________________________ Please visit our sponsors: RadGad(sm): The Place for Useful Gifts & Gadgets.(sm) http://www.radgad.com/, mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED], or 877-5-RADGAD MacTech(r) Magazine: The journal of Macintosh technology and development http://www.mactech.com, mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED], or 805-494-9797 DevDepot(sm): Your Source for RAM, Technical & Developer Products http://www.devdepot.com, mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] or call 877-DEPOT-NOW To submit a posting to NetProLive, mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]. To subscribe to NetProLive, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the SUBJECT line reading "SUBSCRIBE NetProLive". To unsubscribe, the SUBJECT line should read "UNSUBSCRIBE NetProLive". 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