Downgrading from 7 to 6 - any known issues

[radiorental]

I’m done with 7(rant). Before I go back to 6 I’m wondering if there are any known issues reverting?

E.g. will any work I’ve done in 7 on a file open elegantly in 6?
Can 6 and 7 live on the same machine?

thanks!

(rant) To clarify, I’ve tried 7 since release, it’s great to see the bugs get fixed but the UI and specifically the new features are an absolute trainwreck. My productivity has taken a huge hit. The whole UX seems poorly thought out, basic features like the text tool cannot possibly have seen any usability testing. I don’t get the point of the new point tool (pun intended). Bezier curves are still horribly broken. Magnet tool is a mess in terms of selection and z-axis.

I feel that over the past few releases Omnigroup have feature creeped the app away from what made it brilliant. I’d like to move back to 6 and start looking for an alternative. I’ve gone from a huge evangelist in our organisation to warning people to steer clear of the tool. Omnigroup, if you’re reading this - I’ve used your tool since I think v2 or 3? At least ten years now and I’ve got 20+ years in the design and UX field - your tool has been my bread and butter for half my career. To put it mildly you are screwing the pooch and it’s very sad to see what you’re doing to the product.

[kcase]

We’ve worked hard to make OmniGraffle documents compatible between versions, so OmniGraffle 6 should be able to open any documents you’ve edited in v7. The only issues will be around new features that OmniGraffle 6 doesn’t understand, such as artboards: the artboard’s contents will come across just fine, but you’ll also get a shape representing the artboard itself (but it will just be a regular shape in v6, it won’t behave the way artboards do in v7).

And yes, v6 and v7 can live on the same machine. (I primarily use v7, but I also keep v6 in my dock for testing and usually have both versions open.)

Thanks for listing some of the areas you’re struggling with in the latest version. We’d love to fix this; to that end, it would help to have even more detailed feedback to pass along to the team. (For example, what specifically are you having trouble with when using the text tool?) Perhaps you’ve already reported those details elsewhere, in which case thank you! But if not, we’d love to hear more from you about them: email to omnigraffle@omnigroup.com would be ideal.

Thank you for your candor.

[radiorental]

Thanks, I’ll install 6.

I do owe an apology. It looks like the text tool has been fixed, I didn’t see it mentioned in the release notes. I’ve been using a somewhat klunky workaround but now that I’ve tested it, it’s working the way it used to in 6. (I had previously posted a video here about the issue).

I’ll follow up in this thread with video captures of the other problems I’m having.

In general, I don’t mind things like stencils getting re-worked. I expect structural changes as a product evolves, I understand the app has many different userbases, I welcome the ‘facelifts’ to the overal environment. The part I take issue with are the changes at the interaction level to existing features. Users build up muscle memory and I think developers, with the best intentions in the world, underestimate the disruption caused when making changes at that level.

e.g. the creation of the point manipulation tool gives the user more control - great! However I had previously learned to do everything I need in terms of point manipulation with the selection tool. Now those actions are split across two features. And the features work differently across objects.

Specifically: the selection tool works as it always has with points on lines. Cursor changes affordance, I can manipulate beziers etc etc. All of this is turned off on a shape (which is nothing more than a line tbh). However, try using the point tool on a line. No cursor affordance… it ends up being harder to use the point tool on lines than the selection tool. Very bizarre and my point in a nutshell, with every release I feel like I’m having to relearn basic stuff without getting any added value from the arbitrary changes.

Thank you.

[kcase]

OG 6 and 7 should not be open (launched, running) at the same time. They use the same workspaces

This is simply not true. Each app has its own independent workspace, and I often run both versions side by side.

(Most of the rest of this post has to do with why GraffleGuru prefers older versions of OmniGraffle, so I’ve moved it to a more appropriate thread.)

[GraffleGuru]

We may be discussing this at cross-purposes here. Let me try and unravel that.[quote=“kcase, post:4, topic:31719”]

Perhaps what you’re seeing is that each app remembers which documents you had open last, and you happened to have the same document open in each?[/quote]

Assuming (a) you have done the exact test above, and (b) that neither you nor I am confused about opening the same doc from the two apps, which is precisely the wrong thing to do, when trying to demonstrate that one app is remembering what the other app had open and it should not:

Yes, that is what an app is supposed to do (upon launching, to remember the docs that were open when the app was quit). But we do not want OG 5 to remember and open the docs that OG 6 had open, or vice versa.

[quote](Or I guess it’s possible you’ve somehow linked your Application Support directories to each other in a nonstandard way. But what you describe is certainly not stock behavior.)
[/quote]

I have not done any “somehow linking”.

As previously stated, I have done precisely what the support bots told me to do, in writing, in order have OG 6 find my OG 5 Stencils; Templates; and DiagramStyles. Nothing more, nothing less. Therefore I am pretty sure it is standard, not non-standard. Moving from OG 4 to OG 5 was messy. I would not call that “linking”, I would call it copying, from the relevant OG 4 or 5 folders to the new (two) locations that OG 6 require.

(OG 5 and 6 flatten the contents of all the folders, and serves everything up in one “template chooser”, replete with massive duplication. It destroys the arrangement that I had in OG 4. But I think that is a separate issue. Likewise, now I have to maintain Stencils & Templates in two locations, one for OG 4 and another for OG 5, but I am not complaining about that here. I do not have to maintain any of that in OG 6 because, again, OG 6 finds the OG 5 folders.)