Information panel consistency between products

Not specifically a OF2 question but it did occur to me as I’ve been testing OF2 but I have noticed that while OF2 and OG share a consistent integrated approach to the information panel, OO and OP have opted for a floating panel. Any reason for this? I personally prefer non-floating as adopted by OF2 and happy that we are moving away from an old Mac paradigm.

The embedded inspector pane is the newer design; OmniPlan 2 and OmniOutliner 4 both had that portion of their design finalized before we switched to the new design.

That said, one of the most common feature requests from OmniGraffle 6 customers is to give them the option of floating inspectors, so we’re currently working on making this user-configurable.

(This is a somewhat big project as it’s a somewhat involved architecture problem, changing a lot of baseline assumptions that inspectors could previously rely on about being one way or the other. The old floating inspectors could assume they could only ever look at one thing at a time across the entire app, which led to taking some performance shortcuts like only looking at the active window—which doesn’t work while embedded. The newer inspectors have obviously fixed that limitation, but for efficiency they assumed that the document they’re working with would never change since they’re embedded in its window. We’re redesigning now to support both modes, but it’s not as trivial as just flipping a “put this back in a floating window” switch.)

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Incidentally, it’s this kind of explanation that highlights why Omnigroup are so awesome. It’s easy for me as a non-programmer to “complain” but you guys have to actually do the thinking to make it work. Well done and keep it up!

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Agreed, and certainly not a criticism on my part, more a curious observation :)