OmniGraffle is all about connections – the connections between people, teams, goals and thoughts. The benefit of seeing the relationship among them all goes beyond boosting your productivity, according to Ken Case, co-founder and CEO of developer Omni Group.

“It means you get to do other things that are not productive,” he says with a laugh.

The app’s dynamic diagramming system is easy to learn yet incredibly adaptable: move a part of your mind map/project plan/wireframe around and other objects and connectors adjust on the fly. On a Mac with the Apple M1 chip, OmniGraffle and Omni Group’s other productivity apps are seeing performance that’s never before been possible.

We asked Case what M1 means for Omni’s apps, and how it’s helping him make his own connections.

In a nutshell, what problems did Omni Group’s apps set out to solve?
Our apps empower people to think about the problems they’re working on: OmniGraffle is a diagramming tool for organising and communicating your thoughts visually. OmniFocus helps people keep track of their personal tasks. OmniPlan offers powerful project-management tools. And OmniOutliner makes it simple to form and communicate thoughts – it’s used by everyone from lawyers to students, teachers to preachers.

What will your customers be able to create with OmniGraffle running on the M1 chip that wasn’t possible before?
A Harvard professor built a diagram of scientific discoveries, showing how those discoveries led to Newton conceptualising gravity. Right now on an M1-powered Mac, working on this huge document is smoother, more responsive and stupid fast. In the future? Well, this document currently has links to Wikipedia articles and other sites. But with the power of M1, a future version of OmniGraffle could support live embedded videos, so you could watch a clip about what Copernicus had to say that led to this part of the discovery.

Are you seeing a big performance boost?
Things are rendering three times faster than they were before. A program that used to take 100 milliseconds to generate a frame can consistently do it within 30 milliseconds without any software modifications. That sort of improvement doesn’t come along every day.

What else are you excited about?
How M1 integrates the CPU with graphics processing, bringing it all into one unified chipset. Going forward, that means people can make richer diagrams with more types of media, add video to documents and integrate and manipulate shapes on a 3D canvas. The future is wide open.

What does the future hold for you?
I’m really excited by the possibilities of the Neural Engine and machine learning. Maybe they can help us better detect the best layout for a diagram – the one with the fewest line crossings. And we’ll no longer have power constraints: I could imagine our apps becoming monsters in terms of performance.