Omnigraffle Pro 5 and High Sierra

OmniGraffle 5 was originally written in 2008 for OS X 10.5 (Leopard), and though we released v6 in 2013 you can still use v5 today on OS X 10.12 (Sierra). Unfortunately, with High Sierra enough changed that it no longer runs there. But 9 years of OS updates was a pretty good run!

(If you wish, you can still run OmniGraffle 5 in a Sierra VM when running on High Sierra. If you’re curious how it happened to break in High Sierra, Apple introduced a private class which didn’t follow their namespace conventions and thus had the same class name as one of our app classes. This confuses the Objective C runtime and crashes OmniGraffle 5 on launch.)

I understand that you’re missing a few small (but important to you) features that were removed from earlier versions of OmniGraffle, but I don’t think it helps your case when you make specious arguments that OmniGraffle 7 has fewer features than version 4 did. You may not care about any of those new features, such as SVG import and JavaScript-based automation, but many of our other customers certainly do! (And many customers found that removing some of the features you miss improved their workflow.)

I’d love to bring back support for some of your favorite missed features, such as being able to assign a different page layout in each canvas. I do see the value in having that capability—though if we bring it back, I’d like to do so in a way that doesn’t force the old version’s workflow complexity on customers who don’t want or need it. (That complexity was one of the top sources of tech support traffic in those old versions: customers would change their page layout and print and wonder why most of their canvases weren’t using the new layout.) But if you truly feel that none of the features added to the app over the last ten years were useful, then I’d suggest you invest in a VM and continue using the version that worked best for you. (Which you can do because, in fact, we do build our software to last—as long as you continue to run it in a compatible environment.)