As you may know, last summer we made the difficult decision to stop selling OmniGraphSketcher and focus on our other applications. As part of this decision we elected to remove the app from our website instead of continuing to offer it as a free product as we have done with other apps in the past. Why? People have continued to use those free apps, but we don’t have enough time to work on them. That means that when bugs crop up (usually in new OS releases), we aren’t able to fix them in a timely manner and everyone ends up frustrated.

With OmniGraphSketcher, we’ve decided to go a different route: open source. Open source means everyone has access to OmniGraphSketcher’s code, and anyone who is so inclined can work on it. Bug fixes are no longer dependent on our CEO taking vacation time, and new users can discover the app without generating support costs for an project that is no longer a revenue stream.

We’re aware that there are drawbacks to open source software, but we’re convinced that setting GraphSketcher free is the best option going forward. We’re proud of the work that we did on OmniGraphSketcher, and we’d love it if as many people as possible were able to use it. In fact, the support that we received for OmniGraphSketcher after we discontinued it is one of the reasons we think this project will work well.

For non-developers, a download of the Mac app is available from the new project’s home on GitHub. On the iOS side, submission to the App Store is dependent on a couple of trickier things, but we’re hoping that GraphSketcher will make it back there without too much delay.

If you’re a developer who’s interested in poking around the GraphSketcher source code, just:

git clone --recursive git://github.com/graphsketcher/GraphSketcher

GraphSketcher relies on our existing open source frameworks, but building the app is still as simple as cloning, opening the workspace for the app you’d like to build (Mac or iPad), and hitting the play button.

So, while it’s not the end of the road for GraphSketcher, we are putting OmniGraphSketcher to bed. If you’re a fan of the old app we hope you’ll check out the new project and post your feedback to GitHub for future contributors to take a look at. And of course our support humans will continue to provide assistance to paid customers of OmniGraphSketcher for Mac and iPad on the versions of OS X and iOS which they support.