OmniGraffle 5.0 released

Sweet, yesterday night, right before I actually wanted to get some sleep, the OmniGroup released version 5.0 of their great diagram tool OmniGraffle. Back when they first announced the first beta, they said this:

As for pricing, any OmniGraffle 4 purchases made on or after October 31 will receive a free upgrade to OmniGraffle 5 when it ships in early 2008.

OmniGroup

So I tried right away to run OmniGraffle 5.0 with my old license key (which I bought on 11/19/2007) just to get a nice error message telling me, that the key only works for OmniGraffle 4.x. I emailed sales right away … And also got an answer right away :-) According to the friendly person at the other end of the tubes, OmniGroup would start sending out update licenses later that day.

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*sleeping*

And yes, just got my OmniGraffle 5.0 license. So if you haven’t got your yet and you purchased OmniGraffle 4.x after October 31, contact the sales department at OmniGroup :-)

But now to the actual product: I’ve been working with it since the first beta and mostly really like it. It’s a good iterative release with one big feature for me: Support for the binary VISIO file format. Too bad it’s online import but I guess you can’t have everything ;-) What I don’t really like is the way the inspector got changed again. For me personally the inspector of OmniGraffle 3 was still the best since you could easily switch from each panel to another using just your keyboard. Now you just have access to a group of panels. Naturally you can solve this by just using the OSX keyboard shortcuts, but default settings back then just felt more natural to me :-)

Purely from the UI I think that OG5 is a update worth its price since it really cleans up the whole interface not to mention the subgraph feature in OG5 Pro, which I can definitely see myself using a lot in the future.