I have been using FreeHand heavily in the last year to draw maps, especially for the Camp and the Congress.

But except for a couple of nice features Macromedia‘s software is a real pain in the ass. I am talking about carbon-ness, slowness and the long history of bad user interface design and so obvious omissions like transparency in colors (yes, there is the possibilty of making fills transparent but it doesn‘t work for strokes and it is not really tied to the concept of color at all).

Opening the stage for OmniGraffle. The latest update of this well-engineered piece of software, especially in the Pro version, is very strong step forward. Not only for OmniGraffle users.

Everything is so easy. Each shape can be rotated (yes, FreeHand can rotate, but you have just no chance of ever resetting it to it‘s original rotation). The layer feature is as strong as Photoshop‘s. And best of all: everything is so logical. OmniGraffle is easy to use, easy to learn and melds into Quartz perfectly.

I could continue for hours raving about this milestone release, but best is you check it out for yourself. The OmniGroup is cool enough to offer full-functioning license keys on a daily basis so that everybody can check it out as long as he wants with no crippled feature set. Well done!