I blog therefore I think.

Oh shit, it starts tomorrow!

I’ve lost track of the number of occasions somebody has handed me a drawing that’s obviously been drawn with a spreadsheet. Excel is the worst for this (perversley because it make it so easy). Frankly I’ve been prone to do it my self. It’s the old picture is worth a thousand words thing. Short of procuring a copy of Visio, a spreadsheet really is the only tool available. In the Windows world at least.

Several years ago I was astounded by an application which came bundled with my PowerBook G4. A diagramming tool called OmniGraffle. It truly was the missing link in my killer-app palette. Okay like the spreadsheet and word processors and a number of other applications that I always insist on having and installing, it wasn’t something that I used especially often. But if ever I needed it it was there for me if I ever felt the need to fidget around getting obsessively compulsive about aligning handles to the grid.

Back in February I found myself with my shiny MacBook Pro, a pressing need, and no installed copy of OmniGraffle. Such a shame, a marketing ploy no doubt. But it was easy enough find, download and install; trial licences available, and it appeared to be reasonably priced if I ever decided to take the plunge. Alas, that’s where the ease stopped. It had been updated. It was just about useable is the best that can be said for it. The the lightweight, intuitive, jump on board learning curve which gives Aqua the air of an educational toy had gone. To be replaced by something which seemed ever so much like a Microsoft attempt to play reductio ad absurdum with the core Apple UI paradigms. Sure Aqua isn’t perfect (oddly in my eyes KDE is still rules), but this version of OmniGraffle could only be used with the assistance of multimedia online help. Believe me, that’s a high criticism for any soft/hard/vague-ware in my eyes.

Then that MacBook got nicked. By the time I’d this new one OmniGraffle had been upgraded. Only this new version was completely unusable. Seriously. I suppose if I first drew my image on graph paper, made detailed measurements with a ruler and protractor, then got totally anal, I could possibly use it to churn out an image that bore a similarity or two to what I wanted. Although if I was going to go that far I’d borrow my kids’ paintbrushes and use a camera to put it in the digital realm. The sodding thing was twice as expensive too, all of which had me wondering if I’d not understood the core purpose of the original software.