All of a sudden, Mac OS X has looked more beautiful than ever. I don't know if Apple's made some minor tweaks in the 10.2.6 update, or if it's the result of checking out a stellar Cocoa application, OmniGraffle 3. Or maybe I've been looking at too many advance screen shots of Longhorn.
Regardless, the new OmniGraffle is an amazing application. Traditionally, I've found it to be great for agile modeling. The new versions add to that with all sorts of really cool and useful layout time hints. As you're moving objects around, little blue hints pop up to tell you when your object is evenly spaced with objects around it, or aligned with objects around it. This little nugget alone makes it easier to put together simple object diagrams that are balanced and easy to look at. The new OmniGraffle user interface has reorganizable inspector palettes, similar to what can be done in Adobe and Macromedia tools these days. But OmniGraffle employs a subtle but cool Quartz effect - as you move a palette close to another one, little radio waves can be seen, showing potential communications between the two palettes. Once they actually touch, they join up into a single item with expandable and collapsable parts. The OmniGroup has also put the keyboard shortcuts needed to show/expand any of these palettes right on them, allowing very quick access to any tool you might need. Very nice, especially in low resolution settings where only a few can be displayed at once.
There are a lot of other great new features, and there's a professional edition available as well. This is an application that should be in everyone's toolkit.