hi fuck off

I am busy fiddling around with Salling Clicker to prepare my new presentations on Project Blinkenlights that will be held this week and next week in Zürich (Switzerland) and Helsinki (Finnland).

It is not really easy to squeeze in all the material in a talk that is meant not to be longer than 60 Minutes. Our documentation videos alone would fill half an hour, so in the end I can only show parts of it along my other presentation.

But there is so much to show. The cude animations and the backstage photography in Berlin and Paris.

Following a small discussion on the (german) MacHackers mailing list about the obvious lack of a good project planning tool I poked a mid-size product request mail to the OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner users mailing list of OmniGroup.

It is a shame there is no good project planning software out there for the Mac. Admit it, FastTrack Schedule just doesn‘t cut it. The user interface is pure horror and therefore usuability is more than limited.

I would like to see a OmniProject done by OmniGroup. Their answer: „This is one of the ideas we kick around from time to time, but we‘re not willing or able to commit to anything at this point.“

Well, I hope they will, And I hope they will soon. Looking at their other tools I get the feeling they can‘t be that far from it anyway. They have many of the crucial „other“ things in place (outlining, doing graphics) so adding „project logic“ is the missing step.

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!