Cisco Stencils for Omnigraffle

Background:

I have been seeking a certain charting program for a very long time. I can't even describe it, other than to say that it works with me instead of against me.

I had very high hopes for Inspiration, but that turned out to be underpowered -- though integration of charts and outlining is a very hip thing. Then there was Visio. That had a pretty impressive bit of power, but the interface made me want to hurl: I'm not sure that the application itself can be entirely faulted: we're dealing with a fundamental aesthetic here. Visio on Linux or OSX would probably look and feel different. As it is, Visio makes me think that I'm working in DOS. The mouse tracking, the unfriendly edges of things, the clunky behaviors... it all comes across like a lumberjack trying to sing an aria.

So I was looking for something powerful, yet aesthetically pleasing. I still haven't found it.

I have, however, found something that's awfully good: OmniGraffle. It runs on MacOSX, and it has some extraordinarily nifty features. It also has a very attractive interface, and -- to some degree -- the ability to create one's own charting objects.

It's this ability to create custom objects that brings us to this page.

In the course of studying for my CCNP, I wrote lots of study notes. Occasionally, a diagram is/was awfully useful. I had been working in Illustrator, having created the graphics and then painstakingly connecting things together.

I had toyed with an earlier version of OmniGraffle, and I was sorely tempted. However, the price tag was a turn-off, as was the fact that the native palettes were a bit skimpy in terms of hardcore network tools.

When I discovered that the application had come sharply down in price, and when I found out that I could import external graphics, I ran out of reasons to not buy it.

The road since then (all 2 weeks of it) has not been entirely clear. My main beef is that Illustrator graphics can only be imported from pdf, and the 'page' of the pdf has to be basically the same size as the graphic you're importing. For people with a single graphic to import, that might not be a horrible burden. However, my first stencils (found here) have 24 graphics. That means creating 24 new documents in Illustrator, each sized to the exact dimensions of the object, and then saved as a .pdf. Groan.

Right now I'm working on a set of switches and hubs that have easy-to-use input connectors. The magnets in OmniGraffle cannot be aligned or distributed, so they have to be manually placed, one by laborious one. To accommodate a variety of network layouts, each basic shape (switch / hub) has 16 variations, each with various numbers of input lines on the four sides of the object. So I'm faced with more than 32 files that have to be created in just the right size, copied, and saved in pdf format -- and finally imported, one by one, into a stencil.

Final gripe: you can't import graphics into OmniGraffle Standard: you have to use Professional. That would deserve a royal flaming, except that you can get a one-day license for the Professional version for the cost of a (free) trip to their web site.

So here they are: the two stencils, both sitting in a single disk image file that's been compressed. The one called "Cisco1" has no magnets: you may (easily!) attach your own. The other is "Cisco1_mags", and it has a bunch of magnets that have been manually placed onto each image. Of course, you can modify these to suit your tastes. Enjoy.

Given that the original shapes are not of my design, I can scarcely claim a whole lot of legal ownership over these stencils. If you like them, drop me a line, send some money (I pay for my hosting), or a make me a job offer.