I’ve been working on the wireframe for a site that I’m doing the code for. That’s a little unusual for me in that I’m a subcontractor and that sort of thing is generally provided by the client. I used to do these things in Visio under Windows, but since I’m on a Mac, that means booting Parallels to do a simple thing, which hogs insane amounts of resources. So, I decided to give OmniGraffle a shot, and boy am I glad I did! The included stencils aren’t bad, but for the purposes of wireframing a website, I strongly recommend going to their site and following the link to their 3rd-party stencils link. These blow away most of the stuff I’ve ever used under Visio. Not only do they have multi-platform OS UI ones, but they also have multi-platform stencils for web browsers. Neato! If I want my wireframe to look one way for Windows and another for Mac, Linux, Motif, etc., I can, simply by using the appropriate stencils and referencing them on different layers.

Now, this may be old news to a lot of people, but it’s pretty great for me! I used to do all this stuff on paper, and I will probably continue to do so for roughing layouts out, but I can pretty much assure you I won’t be booting to Parallels to do this outlining anymore! Of course, Visio still wins hands-down when it comes to building RDBMS designs, because not only can you lay out the database visually, you can export the schema directly into the database engine itself, which I’ve always thought was more than slick.

The other major reason OmniGraffle wins my heart is because it takes advantage of the Mac OS UI, which is far superior to anything on the Windows side. Visio is incredibly powerful, but it’s not very intuitive to use, and the UI is just crazy. I know I could modify the toolbars, change some of the default behaviors, make modifications to various parts of the interface, but why should I? Seriously! Why can’t things just kind of work right out of the box when it comes to Microsoft’s software. Even their new ribbon interface leaves a lot to be desired, it just isn’t very smart and never seems to remember that you *want* to see some options, even after you’ve tried to find them several times. I find it interesting that their new Windows Office UI is finally catching up to their Mac Office counterpart after all these years :-) But I digress…

You know what else is cool?  You can take a bunch of stencil sets, pick the individual stencils you like, and drag them into a new container to create custom sets in an instant. You can even drag images and stuff right into the window and they become stencils too.  Talk about handy! I had to do a wireframe that contained a WYSIWYG editor, so I just came into my blog, took a snapshot of the toolbar, dragged it into my new stencil container, and bang! instant WYSIWYG editor element. Kick. Ass.

So I’m having a grand old time doing wireframes on my machine for the first time ever. Normally I find it to be a tedious, boring, and nearly painful exercise in futility, but I did them anyway begrudgingly because I knew what it meant: a far easier time putting visual elements into place after the coding had been done. That doesn’t mean I always had to like it, though - there’s something special about flying blind and making it up as you go along. Undoubtedly you know that by “special” I mean “insane”. And I get to look at pretty pictures of sites that are yet-to-be-made, almost a window into the future. A bleak future filled with code and QA, but the future none the less.