Just read this post from @MacSparky .
It made me realize that I completely left out a significant part of Omnigraffle!
All this time, I have been using the app only as a diagram designer making use of the efficient organization and alignment capabilities. This is very efficient but nothing new under the sun compared to similar apps. I also used the automation capabilities to programmatically generate documents which was very neat…
What I discovered David’s article, is that when in preview mode, you can intereact with elements of the graph and they can perform some actions (open links, run apple script, interact with the document itself, etc…) allowing to create documents that can be intereracted with.
Which brings me to this post: did you know if was possible? Do you have some use-cases to share? I would be interested in finding out! In a way it almost reminds me of a Tinderbox usage…
I have known for ages, but could never think of a use case. What David’s profiled is a neat one, though I think I’d stick to a simple Trello board or similar instead.
But now that I’m thinking about it… can these interactive graffles be exported at all? I may have a use for that…!
Edit: a web-based embed would be cool, too, and might be possible given OmniFocus’s recent web foray. Hmm. Might have to send Omni a feature request…
The reason I’m not doing this in Trello is because:
- I wanted one page with multiple boards. The whole idea of everythign on one page
- I want the ability to tweak the look over time. I’ll be living with this thing.
- I’m not collaborating on this. It’s just for me.
I realize I’m an outlier on this … but I feel like this solution really scratched the itch.
I hear you. It is extremely tempting. You’ve got me thinking about OmniGraffle’s scripting library, too—Hazel rules for new projects that run AppleScripts to add new projects automatically, with different shapes/colours depending on what it is…
But this:
Maybe it’s because I used to be a graphic designer, but I would lose an afternoon a week to tweaking the look over time!
Trello is inflexible in layout and organisation and wastes too much screen real estate. Plus I find the dragging of cards around a little asinine.
Come to think of it, one might (some already do) create a giant mind map in mindnode or similar for the same purpose with close to the same benefits.
I guess it depends what’s your preferred way to visualize tentacular information.
This is an interesting use for OmniGraffle.
I’ve been using Curio for this for years – which i find more flexible and feature rich than OG for this sort of set up. YMMV. And of course, Curio has no mobile app. (@DrJJWMac is a master at kanbaning with Curio.)
Following up on my exported interactivity question: it turns out, if you use “jumps elsewhere” and “external URL” actions, these may be viable in an exported HTML image map.
“Jumps elsewhere” also works in an exported PDF.
Looking for additional posts on the topic I found the kanban thread you’re mentioning on the curio forum
Someday I should update that for Curio 14 and some of the streamlined boards that I am using.
—
JJW
You could absolutely do this alternatively in Curio or Mindnode.