tech guy in midtown

Last night I downloaded OmniGraphSketcher and gave it a test drive.  I’m a huge fan of OmniGraffle, OmniGroup’s diagramming program, so I was curious to see what their new graphing program had to offer.  In short, I like the usability that it inherited from OmniGraffle, but they need to make several improvements before I would even consider paying them $29.95.

For years I’ve been searching for a graphing platform that helps me quickly create Tufte-quality graphics.  I’ve had the best luck with programming-based environments such as NodeBox, Processing, or PSTricks (within LaTeX).  Back in 2000 I even wrote my own framework called TexLogo, which was a language and interactive system for illustrating Latex documents with logo turtle graphics. These frameworks are all drawing programs with an API.  As such, they give you the finest level of control with the unfortunate downside of being labor intensive.  Whenever you use them you risk diving down the rabbit hole.

The other end of the spectrum are programs that easily produce bad or misleading graphs.  Excel and gnuplot easily crank out ugly graphics.

So I like OmniGraphSketcher’s approach.  The program mixes hand-guided drawing with x-y data coordinate locations.  The default result is clean and sharp, just like diagrams that come out of OmniGraffle.  Unfortunately it’s not a finished product.  Specifically, I need it to include the following:

1. Units other than foating point numbers.  Most importantly, they need to add support for dates.  You can’t draw a time series graph with the program.
2. Titles.  Yes, you can double click to add a label, but there’s no built in support for title or sub-titles.
3. Legends.  This can also be done manually, but they could facilitate it so that you can link data points or series with a legend.
4. More options for the axes.  For example I’d like the option to only show tick marks.  And I’d like the ability to only show specific tick marks.  I don’t want to be forced to use evenly spaced tick marks.

If the OmniGroup developers make these improvements, then I’m likely to send them thirty bucks.

Here’s a quick example graph that I threw together.

Here’s something closer to what I’d like that I made with OmniGraffle.