2nd Apple Store will open at University Village

It's officially a two-fer: Apple Computer is not only opening its Bellevue Square Apple Store on May 10, but it's also starting construction soon on another in the University Village mall. The company is already advertising for employees at U Village.

The Apple Stores I've visited in California and New York offer the latest Mac models, and also feature areas for testing digital cameras, digital camcorders, scanners and other equipment connected to a Mac.

Another nice reason to visit, according to Apple spokeswoman Jane Rauckhorst: "All of our retail stores have free Internet access, and we have wireless access in all of our stores." The next time you think about how to download that 80-megabyte Mac OS X update or iMovie update, you can pay a visit to the store.

I'll have details about the U Village and Bellevue Square stores in the future.

OmniGraffle and OmniWeb

Speaking of U Village, the offices of The Omni Group, a Mac OS X application company, are located just north of the shopping area (www.omnigroup.com). Omni just released updates for two of its products, OmniGraffle and OmniWeb.

OmniGraffle is a structured drawing program that allows users to take shapes and connect them. It sounds like a simple task, but it's what led Microsoft to acquire Visio, another Seattle company, for $1.5 billion in stock back in 2000. Some Mac owners I know have kept a PC on hand just to run Visio, so critical is the program to their daily work.

The power of these drawing programs lies in relationships: You connect parts of objects, like a boss and a subordinate on an organizational chart, and no matter where you move those objects, they retain the same relationship. A line always connects them.

Structured drawing is useful when creating not just organization charts, but circuit diagrams, office layouts and flow charts. Omni also has a free download area with extra "stencils," its name for prefabricated objects such as desk chairs. Stencils are the backbone of creating sophisticated drawings with little effort.

OmniGraffle 3 markedly cleans up its interface. The 20 Inspector palettes can now be neatly stacked and hidden or shown without requiring several monitors' worth of territory. The Pro version also includes support for importing and exporting Visio documents using XML, a standard format.

Like the previous version, however, OmniGraffle requires an investment of time to learn. Although you start with dragging and dropping, understanding how objects and lines work takes some getting used to. Oddly, experience with other desktop publishing programs might slow you down in learning OmniGraffle's conventions. The curve might be steep, but it's rewarding given the power in building smart objects.

The regular version of OmniGraffle 3 is $70, or a $25 upgrade from version 2; the Pro version is $120, or a $50 to $60 upgrade. A free demo can be downloaded.

OmniWeb is a commercial-ish Web browser. Individuals can use it in unlicensed mode and not receive tech support, or pay $30 to go legit.

Version 4.2 is also superior to its previous release, rendering a complicated Web page using advanced Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) geometry rapidly and as perfectly as Safari, Netscape 7 or Internet Explorer 5.2.2. Previous versions choked on certain CSS attributes used by an increasing number of sites.

OmniWeb has advantages over other browsers for niche audiences. It offers speech recognition, a wide variety of language localization (a version of the program relabeled for a given language), and an in-line HTML editor, among several unique features.

Surfing Safari

Apple released its own browser update, bringing its Mac OS X 10.2 browser to public beta 2, also known as v73. The latest version appears to correct a host of problems that I've experienced while connecting to secure sites, as well as increase how rapidly pages display.

Safari can now track and store Web-page passwords entered into forms, and automatically fill forms with information you've previously entered. You can also turn those options off.

Unfortunately, you still can't tab in forms to fields that are pop-up menus (as in Internet Explorer), which is a frequent problem for Washingtonians. I'm tired of having to drag and select Washington from the very bottom of a list of states instead of just typing "w"; aren't you?

Software updating

A few weeks ago, in discussing Apple Software Update, I noted in passing that Microsoft's Windows XP software updater, unlike Apple's, uploads information about the local system, including applications installed.

While XP does have program code that can collect this information as part of its software update, the option isn't yet enabled, according to Brian Livingston, a Seattle writer who produces the mailing list Brian's Buzz (www.briansbuzz.com). Windows does send the product identification of the copy of Windows installed and the system's hardware information.

Apple declined to respond to requests for details on how it handles this balance of privacy and updates.

Glenn Fleishman writes the Practical Mac column for Personal Technology and about technology in general for The Seattle Times and other publications. Send questions to gfleishman@seattletimes.com. More columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists