OmniGraffle Pro
When not organising and creating navigation systems, chances are pretty good that Information Architects are creating sitemaps, wireframes, and flow diagrammes. Aside from good old pen and paper (which I use most often, especially for the initial designs), I use OmniGraffle Pro, from OmniGroup.
I’ve been using OmniGraffle Pro since its first incarnation on MacOS X. During every iteration, I’ve found a reason to upgrade. The Folks at OmniGroup write good code, and add features that are useful to their users. We like this approach to application design. In their latest version, they’ve added the ability to make “Master Canvases”. If you’ve used Quark XPress, InDesign, or any other professional page layout application, you know the concept. You create a Master Canvas, and you can link subsequent pages to that Master. Changes in the Master affect all linked pages. Had this been available in the prior version, it would have saved me days of effort.
It’s not a perfect application. It tends to be slow on a G4 laptop with thousands of elements on a page, and while generally spot on, their smart guides/”snap to” function can sometimes make it difficult to properly align objects merely by dragging one. Despite these flaws, it’s a solid tool that earned its place in my toolbox.