Master canvases and shared layers

William,

I'm glad to hear that the multiple selection issue on OG5 is only a
bug. Thanks for that confirmation.

I'll send a message to OmniGraffle support about the loss of master
canvases and the usabilty of shared layers, but I thought it would be
good to hear others opinions about this on OmniGraffle Users as well.

I really like the ability to use multiple shared layers, but what
would work for me is a slightly different direction that combined
shared layers with Masters. The kind of functionality would be:

* Master canvases as in OG4
* Ability to use shared layers in master canvases
* Possibly the ability to create shared layers only without masters

The implication of the above might be that you would re-introduce the
masters panel above the canvases, and the masters and shared layers
would live there. You could drag a single master to a canvas. I guess
it would also need to be possible to drag individual shared layers to
a canvas. There's complexity in this possibility that I don't like
though.

What I liked about master canvases was that my template could contain
a lot of masters for every diagram type I use, but on any given
document, I would typically only use some of those masters. For me,
it's analogous to the use of Masters in Keynote. There are dozens of
masters, but I only use maybe 20-50% of them on any single document.

Shared layers are super useful and is something I've wanted for a long
time. As an ex-Visio user it reminds me of how I was able to use
background pages which can contain background pages. That inheritance
of objects is actually quite nice. It just seems to me that the master
canvas model, like the background pages model, is much more intuitive.

While shared layers are valuable, using them is difficult. To add to
the usability issues, the hiding/showing of the icons for
visibility/printing/locking layers is confusing and takes too much
trial and error up front, and is difficult to recall. There's an
opportunity to make some decisions to improve usability on all of the
issues.

Thanks for listening,
Michael