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), 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.
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?
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..
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.
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.
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), 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.