Omni, OmniGraffle

Productivity tools are not meant to be fun they are meant to help you be productive. Which is probably the reason most people hate work. How much better it would be if you got points for everyone PowerPoint you spent weeks preparing that nobody ever bothered reading in the end. PowerPoint points! It could change the world!

But we digress. This review is about Omingraffle which is about as much fun as you can have wireframing with your clothes on (not that you should really be wireframing with you clothes off to be honest).

I do quite a lot of wireframing for work and have used a wide variety of different programmes for different platforms including Axure for the PC and PowerPoint but Omnigraffle for the Mac is the one that I like best.

This is not because it's the easiest to use, I actually prefer Axure more for ease-of-use, but it's because they have a big community who develop open-source wireframe templates for projects which make it a breeze to develop wireframes for anything from an iPhone to a Facebook application.

It's amazing that such highly skilled designers take the time to develop these sorts of open source tools but they do. Recently I spent a week trying to wireframe an iPhone app before I found the Omni template and then I managed to scrap what I was doing and redo it all in only a couple of days.

The downside is it's only for the Mac so if you have a PC at work you are screwed but if you have Macs download the trial and give it a go.