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

Why there is no outline mode to quickly create flowcharts via keyboard input is beyond insulting. It’s 2025 and this feels like expensive baby software.

While you can now import different visio file formats into OmniGraffle, reality is they arrive somewhat scrambled (I tried every visio format and they all come thru imperfectly). So if you have a complex drawing, you can count on up to 50% of connectors, labels, etc. to be wrong. Also when you export out to visio, there’s only one format available, which MS365 VISIO cannot recognize thus can’t open. In its current state, it remains unusable for anyone working with Visio files (99.99% of Enterprise IT organizations!).