Ken CaseDo I know any tech writers who would be interested doing some contract work? (The specific project I have in mind is the user guide / reference manual for OmniGraffle 8.)
Feel free to reach out privately, here or via email ([email protected]).
David Foster@kcase Glad to hear OmniGraffle is still under active development. Still my favorite tool for *high-fidelity* diagrams. Alas I mostly cannot use at work because there’s no online *collaborative* interface that allows other team members to edit diagrams AFAIK.
@davidfstr Or is the primary issue that the team members don't have Apple devices, so they're not able to use OmniGraffle themselves to make edits to a shared document?
@kcase Our engineering team all uses Macs, so no trouble editing. It’s just cumbersome to have to get a link to Dropbox (which we are deprecating internally) or to GitHub, download a file, edit, screenshot something to insert elsewhere, and reupload a file.
@davidfstr Does that mean that even the "view" action could involve OmniGraffle, if the wiki linked to an omnigraffle:/// URL that worked on any team device that has OmniGraffle installed (Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Vision Pro)?
I've been thinking about universal document library links, where you could link to something like omnigraffle:///library/MyTeam/MyDocument and it would automatically open MyDocument from MyLibrary when known, or prompt to locate and define MyLibrary when not known.
@davidfstr The idea there being that it would be completely agnostic about the underlying sync technology. Each person can decide how each library’s folder syncs between systems (iCloud Drive, git, Box, rsync) and then you just tell OmniGraffle where to find the local copy of the library.
@kcase Our product manager is not using a Mac, so an omnigraffle:// URL probably wouldn’t work. — On engineering laptops where OmniGraffle is setup in advance (not always the case), presumably such a link could work, especially if it could push/pull directly from Dropbox, Google Drive, and GitHub (which are all the hosting locations we use).
@davidfstr So would it be enough for the PM to place a PDF/PNG representation on the wiki? Or probably not, because then you'd have to update that page every time the document changed.
So in that case you'd need some sort of server component to present an image representation of the current version of the document. What are the security implications for you? Would you want that component to be hosted by Omni, or self-hosted by you somewhere on prem?
@davidfstr (Or maybe I jumped ahead too quickly, and you could put the PDF/PNG representation on the wiki, if OmniGraffle were configured to automatically update that representation.)
@kcase I’m fine manually updating an image in the Google Docs wiki page when the diagram changes. No diagram provider (TLDraw, Figma FigJam, Lucidchart) currently has a Google Doc integration that works smoothly enough to actually use.