Version 1.5 incorporates a lot of improvements that were suggested (or written!) by kind folks in the Mac community. This time around, Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software was especially helpful in making sure our indexing process works equally well on Snow Leopard and earlier versions of Mac OS X.

And thanks to Automator, Helpify is now an applet, not just a command-line script. You can drop your source outline right on it. Other new niceties include variables stored inside the source outline instead of inside the script, and better handling of anchors that appear at the top of a page.

I hope you find this new version of Helpify useful. Please let us know what you think!

Download Helpify 1.5

That one discovery pretty drastically improved my interface design workflow. Before that, having to export to PNG for every change to any graphic in a mockup meant that I didn’t go into Photoshop very often, and I used OmniGraffle to create graphics whenever I could get away with it. Well, OmniGraffle is a superb diagramming app, and it can even hold its own for a lot of graphics work, but it’s not Photoshop. Sometimes you just need those layer styles, shape layers, and masks.

Here’s how I’ve been doing it:

• Working on a mockup in OmniGraffle, realize I need a graphic.
• Switch to Photoshop, create the graphic, and save the file.
• Click and hold on the document icon in the Photoshop window’s title bar, then drag it to the OmniGraffle canvas.
• Take advantage of OmniGraffle’s guides, alignment controls, grouping, tables, and other conveniences to arrange things just right.
• If the graphic needs to change, make the adjustments in Photoshop and save again.
• Just drag the new version right on top of the existing object on the OmniGraffle canvas to replace it.

The screenshot is an actual in-development inspector design for a future Omni product! (With all of its text replaced by neologisms from Finnegans Wake, of course.)

Download Helpify.zip

The included outline acts as documentation and as a starting template. If you have any feedback, or you’d like to help improve my decidedly un-engineer-like code, please let me know at helpify at omni group dot com.

Update: Version 1.1, uploaded October 31, 2008, includes code cleanup, a company web site variable, and the ability to use Helpify as a module for other Python scripts. Many thanks go to Matteo Rattotti of Shiny Frog for his feedback and patience.

Update: Version 1.2, uploaded November 18, 2008, includes a bit more cleanup and much better handling of Unicode throughout the source outline. Thanks to Markus Müller of MindNode for his feedback and patience.

Update: Version 1.5 was uploaded December 21, 2009. See the new blog post for details!

It took me a while to realize this, but almost every time I need to put some kind of stuff on a page, and it makes a difference where on the page that stuff is, OmniGraffle ends up being the best tool for the job.

Let me ’splain: OmniGraffle might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you need to fill out some official forms for the U.S. Government. Or, say, some character sheets for your weekend Dungeons & Dragons session. But it should be. Check this out:

• Grab an electronic version of the form you need to fill out. Scan it if you have to, but most official forms are available as PDFs these days. Some of them even claim to be fillable, but I’ve never gotten them to work properly in Preview or Acrobat.
• Copy each page from the document (in Preview) and paste it onto a fresh OmniGraffle canvas.
• For each canvas, lock the layer that has the form on it, and create a new layer for your information.
• Make text objects all over the canvas to fill in each blank. Once you have a text object you like, you can Option-drag it or paste it all over and just replace the text.

Why this is so much handier than filling out forms by hand:

• You can use the alignment inspector and smart guides to make sure everything is lined up just right and perfectly legible.
• If some of the boxes are really tiny, you can play around with the font to get everything to fit in there just right.
• Filling out the same info over and over is easy: just copy and paste the existing text objects with the info you need.
• Once you’ve saved the file, you automatically have a backup copy for reference or revision.
• You can make an OmniGraffle template that has the right paper size, two layers per canvas, and a nice grid for keeping things orderly.

When I was going through the process to get someone a visa to live in the USA, this technique saved me heaps of time and stress. And now I have backups of every form (there are lots of forms involved).

Have you found any weird or unexpected uses for Omni apps? Maybe next time I’ll tell you about how I’m using OmniGraffle as a level editor for a video game I’m working on…

Please keep in mind that this release is still under development. Your feedback will help us improve the software, and we apologize if it crashes, corrupts your files, steps on the piano keys at night, or otherwise misbehaves. A more stable release is also available.

As always, please let us know if you have any questions or comments. You can contact us directly via our support page or by using the Send Feedback command in OmniPlan’s Help menu.

Download and enjoy.

More (more better) photos are available at Roberto’s site.

Maybe you already know about OmniWeb’s shortcut feature, by which you can type something like google RPS in the location field to go straight to the Google search results for RPS. You can set up more shortcuts by putting your cursor in a search field at any site and clicking the little magnifying glass that appears at the bottom of the window.

One such keyword that comes with OmniWeb is *; it appends www. and .com to what you type. So if you type worldrps it takes you to www.worldrps.com. That’s handy, but I wanted it to do something even smarter. I changed that shortcut’s URL to this:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%@&btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky

Now when I enter anything that’s not a URL, I end up at Google’s best match for what I typed. This is super-handy when I know the site I want to visit, but I can’t remember the URL. Like, who can remember that the Subversion manual is at svnbook.red-bean.com? Well, now I just type subversion book in the location field and bam, I’m there.

Of course, this shortcut works best when you know there is a single definitive site about the thing you’re looking for. Give it a try today.

Say you have a nice bunch of objects in OmniGraffle you’d like to scale while having the text, stroke width, corner radii, and such scale along with them:

If you just select them all and Shift-drag the corner handle, the lines stay the same width, the corner radii stay the same, and the font size stays the same; not quite what you want:

But! If you instead select them and choose Copy As PDF from the Edit menu, you can paste a representation of all the objects as a single object:

Then you can scale the PDF like a normal image; everything scales with it:

Here’s the cool part: because the PDF contains LinkBack data, you can double-click it to open an OmniGraffle window with your original objects! Edit them however you like, and when you hit Save, the PDF version updates!

Here you see the Scribble plug-in at work. I use Cutout to highlight stuff for screenshots, Zoom to check fine details on interface elements, and Focal Point to avoid distractions while I’m writing in OmniOutliner.

In fact, I think Focal Point is my favorite part of OmniDazzle. Here’s how I have it set up while I’m working in OmniOutliner:

No border, and a low-transparency dark background color. This way I don’t see 16 applications across 30 inches of Cinema Display, shining in my face, while I’m trying to concentrate on writing.

Of course, if you’ve lost your cursor, there are free ways to find it. There are also free web browsers, free outliners, and free graphics applications. But price isn’t the only variable involved; we believe in the idea, yeah, we thrive on the idea that it’s worth paying money for something really, really cool.