OmniGraffle 3

I want to like OmniGraffle, I really do. It’s ambitious and attempts to tackle any number of advanced features of vector drawing and flow charts. It was one of the very first apps I bought for my first iPad even though it cost an eye popping $50 at the time. 10 or 15 years ago it was much more reliable than it is now. I used to use it for maps of complex networks at clients and at home. No simple block diagrams for me! I used the transparency, layering, photographic imports, drop shadows, and other effects quite liberally. No more. With dismay I’ve watched this app degenerate into an assorted collection of crashes, stutters and freezes; it prompts me to submit yet another unanswered "failure report" via mail nearly every time I launch it now. The final straw was when it lost a massively complex drawing just now. I had worked on it for many hours; suddenly when I just started app-for some reason it was only offering a much earlier version of the drawing. I find myself in need of continuously backing up what I’m working on by making extra copies of the document while using this app and I forgot to do it this time. At the end of the day, the frustration, mountains of wasted time, total lack of development or improvement, and apparent abandonedware nature of this app lead me to warn my fellow App Store denizens: stay away from OmniGraffle. And the rest of the developer’s rotten products while you’re at it

I want to like this app. I want to USE this app. But it’s very clunky. I try to position shapes but they snap to weird positions that aren’t even on the grid. Creating custom stencils was brutally non-intuitive (apparently they don’t show up if you save them in the cloud?) Sometimes it gets into a mode where I can’t even add text boxes. That was the tipping point for me, leading me to write this review. I know there’s a powerful tool underneath here, it’s just HARD to use, especially compared with the desktop version. Not what I would expect from an app for which I’ve paid so much, nor from a company with so much experience. I don’t want to have to carry my laptop with me just to make some basic diagrams—that’s why I though the iPad app would be useful. I’m sorry, but this app is just really not quite there.

The UI updates are very good and intuitive (especially if you are familiar with previous versions). But this latest version has huge problems with the gestures I’ve used from earlier versions. For example I use “Duplicate” very often. I touch and hold the object and then two-finger tap where I want the duplicate to be. Instead of duplicating the object, the original object displays it is selected. The older versions would have selected the original object as soon as it was touched. If I two-finger tap a second time the object will be duplicated. This is very awkward. Another problem is that if I tap and hold an object and then two-finger tap (which selects the first object) and then remove my finger from the original object and tap-off to unselect the first object a selection circle is displayed randomly on the screen. If I tap-off again then a selection bubble is displayed. It takes 3 tap-offs to fully clear the selection. I use an iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil and this issue displays regardless of the proximity of the Apple Pencil. I use this tool professionally and this is costing me time. Please fix the gesture issues and I will bump this back up to 5 stars because the new UI is great.