The Omni Group Announces OmniGraffle 3.0 and OmniGraffle 3.0 Professional
Seattle, WA -- March 20, 2003 -- The Omni Group is announcing a major new
version of OmniGraffle, the premiere Mac OS X diagramming and drawing
application. Targeted for early April 2003, The Omni Group will be shipping
OmniGraffle 3.0, as well as a new Professional version. OmniGraffle 3.0
adds a multitude of new features designed to help users create superior
charts and drawings, while OmniGraffle 3.0 Professional provides a powerful
toolset for advanced document manipulation and presentation options.
OmniGraffle Standard 3.0 and OmniGraffle 3.0 Professional require Mac OS X
10.2.
New to OmniGraffle 3.0 are "smart guides": when moving a shape, distance
markers will pop up and tell you when your new shape would form an
equally-spaced row or column with two other shapes. Also when moving a
shape, centerlines (or edge lines) will draw when you are horizontally or
vertically perfectly in line with another shape in your drawing, or the
centerline of the canvas. When rotating or resizing a shape, markers tell
you when your rotation/size matches that of other shapes on your canvas.
New features in OmniGraffle 3.0 also include a complete redesign of
OmniGraffle's Info panels which makes it easier to see what's on them,
easier to hide and show all the tools, and easier to arrange them the way
you like. Individual panel improvements include:
Style & Selection: The comprehensive new Style & Selection panel allows you
to see what styles make up any shape in your document, and drag and drop
styles onto other shapes to duplicate them. Styles can be dragged
separately to apply only a certain attribute to a shape (ie, a blue dashed
line only) or as a group to copy the entire style. Additionally, there is a
new Style Brush tool that allows you to copy styles by selecting a shape
and "painting" the style onto other shapes you click on.
Shadows: The Shadows panel has been completely re-invented to provide many
more options for rendering complex shadow schemes, and you can print or
save to PDF with transparency intact.
Image: Using the Image panel, you can offset images inside a shape by
dragging them in the inspector, and images can be zoomed in or out inside a
shape. This is very useful for creating tiled backgrounds at the right
scale, as well as placing pictures inside frames.
Canvas Size: The Canvas Size panel allows you to set the canvas to be any
size you want. Printer margins can be set manually or you can use the new
option to use the maximum printable area for the selected printer and
paper. OmniGraffle 3.0 will print to any margin size that a printer is
capable of handling, even full bleeds.
Improvements to the toolbar in OmniGraffle 3.0 provide a drop-down menu to
display the various styles used on a per-document basis, so even if you're
editing someone else's document it's easy to make your additions match
perfectly with the original author's work.
Other new features include a new caching architecture that increases speed,
improved AppleScript support, improved support for importing OmniOutliner
files, the ability to choose patterns for shape fills, an improved
Selection tool, and much, much more.
OmniGraffle Pro features:
OmniGraffle 3.0 Professional allows you to import and export multiple-page
Visio 2002 files. Additional export options allow you to export multiple
pages as a multipage HTML document, with links between pages.
New page layout features include mouseless editing (aka "Brainstorming
mode") which allows you to create shapes that are connected or unconnected
to other shapes using only the keyboard.
New multi-page document support allows the Pro user to hyperlink from
within a document to a specific section of a specific page. Presentation
Mode allows you to create multipage slideshows from clickable shapes in
your document.
OmniGraffle 3.0 Professional offers advanced editing capabilities, such as
the new "Workspace" Save and Restore function which makes it easy for you
to save multiple configurations of your Info panels for different editing
functions and switch between them.
The ability to have multiple editing windows on the same document has also
been added, so you can work on different parts of one document in multiple
windows. Users can configure their "favorite" styles for use over and over
again; for instance, if you find yourself frequently drawing a rounded
rectangle with a reddish background a 50% shadow, you can just add this to
your favorites. New manual shape placement guides have rulers you can drag
from either side of your document to create new guides.
To ensure your professional documents will print exactly as you've designed
them, ColorSync Workflow & Proofing has been added to provide in-depth
proofing.
OmniGraffle 3.0 will sell for $69.95, and will be a $24.95 upgrade price
for OmniGraffle 2.0 users. Effective March 15, all purchasers of
OmniGraffle 2.0 receive a free upgrade to OmniGraffle 3.0.
OmniGraffle 3.0 Professional will sell for $119.95. Upgrades from
OmniGraffle 3.0 to Professional will be $49.95, and upgrades from 2.0 to
OmniGraffle 3.0 Professional will be $59.95 until the end of May, and
$74.95 after that.
About The Omni Group:
The Omni Group, founded in 1993, develops Mac OS X applications and ports
games to Mac OS X. The Omni Group has produced OmniWeb, the first web
browser built specifically for Mac OS X, and the winner of two 2001 Apple
Design Awards. The Omni Group also is the developer of OmniOutliner, an
outlining and organizational tool which recently received a 4 mouse rating
from MacWorld magazine, and OmniGraffle, a diagramming application that won
two 2002 Apple Design Awards. The Omni Group is located in Seattle, WA.
More information on The Omni Group is available at www.omnigroup.com.
