Adventures in my MacBook Omnigraffle Riva world

I recently trashed my MacBook by probably installing some random badness (like trying to recompile SCPlugin for MacTel use) so I decided to wipe and re-install which turned out to be a very quick and easy process (minus the transfer time for my music collection).
Now that I’m back up, I’ve been continuing my Mac metamorphosis. The only legacy app from Windows I hadn’t replaced yet was Visio, which I’ve never really liked but due to some process engineering work I’ve been doing lately, has been making it appearance on my desktop regularly. There are a couple of solutions like running Parallels or even maybe VMWare, but I’ve decided that it is time to move on and not put any Microsoft apps of the past on my shiny new Little BlacBook.
For graphing in Mac, OmniGraffle is your answer. I downloaded the trial and jumped right in. The main goal was to recreate the Riva Visio Stencils. Riva is a process diagramming method that focuses on Roles, Activities, and interactions. It comes from the book “Business Process Management: A rigorous approach” by Martin Ould. It was brought to my attention by Neil Benson at Increase Consulting in the UK. I use it to map what people do and how they could interact with a software system.
Business Process Management: A Rigorous Approach (Paperback) by Martyn A. Ould
Here is his site. There are Visio stencils you can download.
Things I like about Riva: - focused on roles and their interactions (via explicit state changes) - compact diagrams vs boxes and diamonds - it is easier for me to follow these diagrams than swimlanes since your focus bounces all over the lanes where Riva has a clear flow - case refinement is easier to extend (decisions or cases) than with typical diamonds for decisions since cases are represented in a linear path that can be added to, where adding more diamonds alters the diagram much more After I maxed out the 20 object limit in the OmniGraffle trial, I bought a Pro license and got down to polishing a first draft of my Riva Stencils. My bet was that by building a set of stencils I’d learn OmniGraffle faster since I had a clear goal in mind plus I’ll be doing some modeling this week and put the stencils to real use.
After about 10 hours of dinking with it, my first draft is complete. The main lesson I’ve learned is that Mac is Beautiful and works. As crazy as it sounds to non-Mac peoples, the quality and style of my Mac seriously does make me happier to work with it which again confirms the “Broken Windows” theory from psychology.
If these work well this week, I may release these to Graffletopia.com and share the love. Here is what I have so far: