John Ballinger

OmniGraffle ROCKS!

“Drawing a diagram with OmniGraffle is as easy as breathing; everything just works the way it should.”
Matt Neuburg - TidBITS

I don’t say this about many products. But what an amazing product. Their support is even better.

OmniGraffle (5.1) is a vector drawing application very similar to Microsoft’s Visio and even supports importing Visio documents. What they didn’t say is how good it is and how easy it is to use.

Currently I am using OmniGraffle for all my iPhone prototyping, design and icons.

What’s So Great?
The best thing is the stencils. There are 3 iPhone stencils that are very awesome for quickly dragging and dropping iPhone shapes onto the page. I bought an icon stencil for $10 bucks but you can use anything including include images/bitmaps.

Drawing is simple and quick, everything can be done on one layer, you can also quickly add further layers and even pages (hello Freehand).

Vector shapes are awesome and the big thing is that once you set the corner radius you can resize the shape without destroying the look (think photoshop and flash sometimes).

There is a huge selection of primitive shapes, stroke weights, fills and gradients with very precise control to get those awesome gradients.

The inspector tabs can also be locked for stroke or fill by simply double clicking that tab until a green lock appears, this way you can have stroke and fill on the same window. (Support told me how to do this).

Exporting and saving images is really good. One neat to trick is to exporting drawings as a PDF then importing them again. This way when you resize say an icon strokes and outline’s will scale proportionally. PNG images are very very crisp and look great on the iPhone. You can also just select one element or a group of elements on the screen and simple export these objects (love this).

What I dont like.

The basic version does not have guides (support said simple draw a box or line as a guide, fair enough).
I found it a little difficult to change the page from inches to pixels but that is pretty simple now.
Once you have draw a complex shape with curves and lines, I could not find out how to add extra points to the shape. That was a little annoying but not a killer.
Don’t drop photoshop yet. OmniGraffle wont allow you to edit bitmap images, so for any complex image editing you will need Photoshop (eg isolating images and getting you assets ready to place).

The Best.

Support! I emailed support to say I really do love this product and it really has speed up my development time and prototyping time and listed my issues. Took support 30 minutes to reply to ALL my questions and provide solid answers. Thanks Paul Palinkas, Support Ninja.

The cost for Standard is $99.95 USD and Pro $199.95 (Visio, guides, notes, SVG, Advanced Text?)

Mini Mortgage Manager icon displayed in the Austin Texas Apple Store. Awesome.

Dog signs in parks are always a bit funny

H2O PHP TEMPLATING ENGINE / LIKE DJANGO

Wow finally I found something that really makes me like PHP so much more. Recently I have been trying to do every new project I start in Google App Engine. Simply I love the Django templates that allows me to quickly build up the project in a tiny amount of code.

After a quick search I found H20 templating system which is port of the Django system.

http://github.com/speedmax/h2o-php/tree/master

The documentation is quick and excellent, setup is simple.
To get started code is simple as this.

*in your template*

{{ person.name }}

*in php*

$person =array(
‘name’ => ‘Peter Jackson’, ‘age’ => 25
);
$h2o->render(compact(‘person’));
 ?>

OK, so that was easy. But you can also get your template to inherit your layout or base template which means it will automatically write into pre-defined areas of this template.

Since using this, it has turned 2-3 pages of pretty messy code down to 3-4 pages of super tiny simple code that is extensible.