

Setting OmniGraphSketcher Free - nickmain
http://www.omnigroup.com/blog/setting-omnigraphsketcher-free

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EvanMiller
I've enjoyed watching the "arc" of GraphSketcher. I went to college with the
original developer, who, upon being sufficiently annoyed with having to draw
supply and demand curves by hand in Econ 101, wrote the code that eventually
became OmniGraphSketcher. Classic itch-scratching if I've ever seen it.

Robin later managed to turn the program into his master's thesis, a conference
paper that won "Best Paper"
([http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1518870](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1518870)),
and an acquisition by the Omni Group, where he went on to develop the iPad
version.

He later left Omni, which is part of the reason that they decided to
discontinue and (later) open-source the product.

I'm look forward to seeing what people do with this code -- as well as what
Robin might have up his sleeve next.

~~~
radicalbyte
Robin's paper is available on his website, here:

[http://www.robinstewart.com/research/](http://www.robinstewart.com/research/)

Or, a direct link:

[http://www.robinstewart.com/research/papers/stewart09graphsk...](http://www.robinstewart.com/research/papers/stewart09graphsketcher.pdf)

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carbocation
The primary question I hoped to see answered in the post was who (ideally,
which individual person) would become the open source repo's maintainer. Does
anyone know?

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utopkara
I adore Omni products. Looking forward to peeking under the hood in this one!

~~~
vidarh
OmniGraffle is the only diagram editor I've ever been happy with. It's the one
OS X app I'm annoyed to not have an equivalent for on my Linux box at home...

It's amazing that Omni's products aren't copied / used as inspiration more -
e.g. it's not that using OmniGraffle as a model for how the UI in a diagram
editor _ought_ to act would be all that hard... I wish the Dia guys would
spent 10 minutes picking ideas from OmniGraffle, for example..

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meemo
The first thing someone should contribute is Sparkle support
[https://github.com/andymatuschak/Sparkle/tree/master](https://github.com/andymatuschak/Sparkle/tree/master)

~~~
protomyth
Is there a maintained version of Sparkle?

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antonyme
Awesome! Kudos to the Omni guys for opening up the code, rather than let it
fall into obscurity. It will hopefully serve as a nice example of how to
architect a professional app.

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peapicker
requires OS X 10.8... I'm not on mavericks yet. Can't be a good reason.

~~~
supercoder
Can't be a good reason you're not on Mavericks. It's free.

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sytelus
This a classic example of how to do bad statistics complete with nice charts.
A fair and a much better metric would be dollar per hour per TB. Each of these
companies manufacture drives in different classes of MTBF. For example WD has
drive with 1 million hours of MTBF and they also have drive with 300K hours of
MTBF (which is 30% cheaper). Higher MTBF translates to higher cost. In
addition you want to make sure you had considered all the discounts. For
example, it would be easy to buy WD drives in higher MTBF class lot more
cheaper on wholesale prices or deals than Seagate drives without deals.

~~~
samps
Maybe you meant to comment on the Backblaze blog post?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7095357](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7095357)

Funny that you're talking about "nice charts," though. Exactly what OGS made.

