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Paul’s story: OmniOutliner

Posted by Linda Sharps on 03.09.10 | 3 Comments

While everyone else in this office goes completely insane working to meet iPad deadlines (seriously, one of our engineers put in something like 20 straight hours of code commits yesterday, which, well, I'm not saying one of our products will for SURE have a weird feature involving a Dali painting and a flurry of Pig Latin, I'm saying it's a POSSIBILITY), I thought I'd share the first of an ongoing series of blog posts unofficially titled OMNI APPS—IN ACTION.

You have to imagine the IN ACTION part with jazz hands, okay? Otherwise the whole title thing just sounds kind of stupid, like something I made up like two seconds ago while drinking a third Red Bull. Ha ha! As if.

Anyway, the idea here is just to share some stories of how people are using our software, which will hopefully provide a little inspiration and maybe even teach you something cool you didn't already know.

We're going to start with Paul Zagaeski, a technology analyst and marketer who relies on OmniOutliner in his job. Not sure how an outline can help you in your work? Read what Paul has to say:

An outliner app has been my most frequently used writing tool since I bought my first computer in 1983. I've always been a words-type thinker (rather than a visual or picture thinker), so I'm drawn to tools that help me organize words fast and efficiently. I can't recall any writing project I've ever tackled that didn't start with some kind of outline.

An outliner helps me keep a sense of control over both the process of writing, and all the content as I research and write draft text. Dave Dunham described outlining as being similar to building a ship: keel, framework, planks, deck, masts are assembled in a connected structure. Writing is starting with an idea or problem, adding questions or main issues to cover, doing research to address the issues, doing analysis and comparison on the facts from the research, deciding what it means, deciding what to say as a conclusion. If writing fiction, it's the same process only using plot points, characters, scenes, dialogue. The key thing I learned about writing is that you don't go from A to Z, stopping at every letter in turn. It's always a jumbled process of adding ideas, gathering bits of information, drafting actual text, and reorganizing, while jumping from one part of the project to another as needed. If I didn't have a writing tool that let me add, move, collapse, expand, sort, number, list, and stick in odd bits of things like pictures and links, it would take me much longer to do half as much.

Paul is currently using OmniOutliner to complete a pair of technology business reports for the site GigaOm Pro. These reports cover the market for digital paid content and the technologies that allow users to quickly and easily pay for things online or on mobile devices. Here's how OmniOutliner is making his job easier:

I used Outliner as my research tool to collect articles and other online content, to record phone interviews and then transcribe the good stuff, and to write notes and comments to myself on what I thought of the material and how I might use it.

Then I used Outliner to create a full outline of the report with headings and key words. I started drafting the sections, starting with company profiles and working backward to describe the market dynamics and business drivers. I pasted in links to the articles I wanted the reader to click through to get more information about a particular company, event, technology, or another writer's point of view. I also pasted in images and graphics I wanted to use in the report. I moved sections around until I thought the report flowed logically from topic area to topic area. Then I exported the whole thing to .RTF and imported it into Microsoft Word for revisions, more writing, and formatting. The document was supposed to be 30 pages, and I found I had written 80+ pages in Outliner! Eventually I divided the report into two documents and they'll be published separately.

Paul says his only challenge with using Outliner was having to apply MS Word styles to each paragraph after importing into Word (but that's because he can't run Office 2008 on his older Powerbook—OmniOutliner Pro can export outline style information that's picked up by the latest version of Word). The biggest benefits: being able to quickly collapse the report and get a good sense of the flow of topics, being able to focus on single sections at a time to write and rewrite them, and being able to record his phone interviews right on his Mac and then transcribe them so he could get all the facts straight.

Thank you, Paul, for letting us share some of the details behind your OmniOutliner workflow. You can read more from Paul at his blog, find him on LinkedIn, or follow him on Twitter.

Do you have an Omni App (in ACTION) story of how you're using our software? Let me know in the comments or via email, I'd love to hear it.
Omni Group’s new website design

Posted by Linda Sharps on 03.03.10 | 24 Comments

If you're not reading this via RSS, you may notice that things look a bit . . . different around here. It's not just the blog that got a facelift—after many many years of the same website design, we have finally made some big changes to good old www.omnigroup.com.

Our main goal was to re-engineer the site so that even us non-technical folks could update it, and if you're interested in the behind the scenes stuff, it's running on Expression Engine. The secondary goal was to spruce up the content and make everything, you know, shinier. A big public thank you needs to go out to our graphics guru, Grayson West, and web-ninjas-for-hire, Blue Flavor, for working through endless revisions and not throttling anyone during the process.

We have plenty of things we plan to add to the site, and we're still working on updating our online store, but we're pretty happy with the new look and feel. We hope you like it too.
OmniGraphSketcher 1.1.1 beta 1 is now available

Posted by Dave on 03.02.10 | Comment

Today we took a break from iPad development and updating the website to push out the first beta of OmniGraphSketcher 1.1.1. This release includes French and Japanese localizations, as well as a fix for a pesky crash involving Undo and lots of other smaller tweaks and fixes. You get get this release via the OmniGraphSketcher downloads page; please be sure to email us (or Help > Send Feedback within the application) with any questions or feedback.
Designing OmniGraphSketcher for the iPad

Posted by Linda Sharps on 02.25.10 | 19 Comments

I like to think that one of my more valuable contributions as an Omni employee is providing the lowest common denominator factor in usability testing. That is, when an engineer wants to really understand how a total Cro-Magnon will be using their app, they come to me.

Oh yeah, that's right. Who's got two thumbs and represents the most pathetic use case? THIS gal.

Anyway, I thought some of you might be interested in seeing how some of our iPad development work is happening for OmniGraphSketcher. Now obviously we do a lot of mockups in what is surely the world's best program for creating IA/UX designs, OmniGraffle. But when it comes to envisioning how something works on a piece of hardware no one can actually use yet, a lot of people here are going low-tech to try and figure it out.

Omni's lead developer for OmniGraphSketcher, Robin, created some iPad-sized paper templates for sketching up ideas.

He didn't stop there, though. No sir, he most certainly did NOT. Here's his custom graph paper notebook, which he cut to iPad dimensions using a table saw.

I want to say that's sort of crazy, except our own CEO Ken Case created a terrifyingly accurate faux iPad using a 3D printer. It—well, it even has a little Omni logo on it. And a 30-pin dock connector. And . . . look, it's just very, very realistic and I'm a little worried about how much sleep everyone is getting, okay?

Here's Robin's own iPad-sized hardware prototype (!) with a variety of UI element ideas designed by our User Experience lead, William Van Hecke.

That's what Robin had me look at the other day, while asking a series of questions. I'm sure he regretted it almost instantly.

Robin: "So let's say you want to turn this point from a circle into a square. What would you do?"

Me: "Buhhhhh. Dur. I touch it?"

Robin (soothingly): "Okay. You see a little blue circle around the element. Then what do you do?"

Me: "Uhhhhhrrrr. I'd . . . maybe I'd press real hard. Like this." *smoosh*

Robin: "Um . . . well, okay. You get a dialogue that says 'copy'."

Me: "OH GOD NO THAT'S WRONG ISN'T IT MY HEAD MY HEAD MY HEEAAAD."

Robin (brisk clap): "Okay then! What say we try this again later."

Lastly, here's Robin interacting with his fauxPad.

I think he's making color adjustments. On a fake, printed-out inspector that Bill made. To the document that is actually just a piece of paper. Man, software development is weird.
OmniGraffle 5.2.2 release candidate 1 is now available

Posted by Joel on 02.24.10 | Comment

Between iPad development meetings, wireframing, mocking things up, and general UI theorycrafting, I managed to remember to release OmniGraffle 5.2.2 rc 1, but almost forgot to tell anyone about it.

So, beta testing went well, and we're here at release candidate stage. Simple enough.

You may find the release candidate at our beta page, and as always, release notes await.
OmniGraffle 5.2.2 beta 1 is now available

Posted by Joel on 02.11.10 | Comment

There just happens to be another platform that we sometimes develop for, that's not the iPad, and as such we've just released a beta version of OmniGraffle and OmniGraffle Professional 5.2.2.

This release contains a good many bug fixes dealing with shared layers and Mac OS 10.6 compatibility, along with fixes to a number of crashes when working with Visio files, PDFs, and subgraphs.

We've added a preference to turn off multi-touch gestures on laptops that have that feature, and a last-minute hidden preference to disable the scrollwheel to zoom in and out when Commmand is held down, for those of you using Apple's new Magic Mouse.

Much more information is in the release notes page, and downloads are on the beta page.
iPad or Bust: two weeks later

Posted by Ken Case on 02.11.10 | 37 Comments

A week and a half ago, I announced that we were planning to bring all five of our productivity apps to iPad. So much has happened in the short period of time since then that it feels like we've been in some sort of time distortion field!

Let me skip straight to the good stuff and share some screenshots with you:

I should point out that the document icons in the document lists come from the QuickLook previews generated on the Mac, so they show features that aren't actually supported in the iPad app yet: for example, if you compare the OmniGraffle canvas screenshot with the corresponding icon in its document list, you'll see that OmniGraffle for iPad doesn't actually render text yet.

We don't even have a mechanism for creating new documents yet: both apps are just loading documents created on a Mac. But it's certainly progress!

Now, I mentioned two weeks ago that we were generally prioritizing iPad work over some of our Mac projects, but that some Mac projects—specifically, OmniOutliner 4 and OmniPlan 2—would take precedence over their iPad counterparts. In response to that plan, I received a lot of feedback that folks would like to see OmniOutliner for iPad sooner rather than later.

So we started thinking about how we could get started on OmniOutliner for iPad sooner. We really don't want to delay OmniOutliner 4, so we instead started thinking about how we could finish OmniOutliner 4 more quickly. We realized that if we scaled back some of the esoteric features which we'd planned for the Pro edition of version 4—cloning and multiple schemas—we could shave three months off its development schedule and get started on OmniOutliner for iPad that much sooner. Now, both of those features are still pretty interesting to us, and we've already laid the groundwork for supporting these in the underlying outlining engine—but we think bringing OmniOutliner on iPad is more important overall, so that's what we're going to do.

So I'm pleased to say that both OmniOutliner 4 and OmniOutliner for iPad will be coming three months sooner!

Oh, what's coming in OmniOutliner 4? We've rebuilt the engine inside of OmniOutliner, so among other things it will support text zooming, showing and hiding columns, "Smart Match" completion cells, searching across all column types, better link handling (no more unfindable tokens!), and (in the Pro edition) saved smart folders. (Also, say goodbye to the old Aqua drawer!)

Thanks for all your feedback on my last announcement, and I look forward to receiving any feedback you might have on this update!
Come see Merlin at Omni's Macworld booth (#760)

Posted by Linda Sharps on 02.09.10 | 29 Comments

From the mouth of the Mann himself, folks:

Merlin Mann: Advanced Secrets of the Omnifocus Ninja

Thursday through Saturday afternoons from 1:30-2:30pm, Merlin Mann (43 Folders, MacBreak Weekly, You Look Nice Today) will stealthily rappel into the Omni Group's booth (#760) to demonstrate the arcane and deadly methods of the OmniFocus Ninja. Long thought by many to be an elaborate myth or hoax, these ancient productivity moves unlock the hidden power of Omni's award-winning task management app.
- Working the bookmarklet
  Friction-free task management right from your iPhone
- Tricking-out your Perspectives
  Slice and dice your work into perfect-sized cubes
- Novel uses for on-hold projects
  Out of sight means out-of-mind -- until you need it
- Location, Location, Location!
  Using the power of location-awareness in your contexts
- BONUS: Five more tiny OmniFocus tricks almost nobody knows about
  (seeeeeekr1t!)
Hope to see you there!
Macworld swag that doesn't suck

Posted by Linda Sharps on 02.05.10 | Comment

Rejected swag items for our booth at the Macworld Expo next week:

• Jellybeans in novelty flavors: Black Licorice, Cumin, Uncoated Aspirin, Gorgonzola

• Foam lightbulb squeeze toy with "I CAN HAZ BRITE IDEAZ?" imprinted on side

• Cadmium-coated fountain pen

• Baby Alive "Wets & Wiggles" doll

• Custom hemp/lanolin blend t-shirt

• Scratch-n-sniff iPads

If you're going to Macworld, make sure to stop by #760 for some actual non-crappy tradeshow stuff, including an Omni Geek-Friendly Field Notebook. For those that buy our software at the show you'll receive a 1GB USB stick, lovingly hand-crafted from both bamboo and awesome.

We hope to see you there!
Introducing OmniPad

Posted by Linda Sharps on 02.04.10 | Comment

We are all very excited about Apple's upcoming iPad. So much so that we couldn't wait for actual production units to start testing our applications. In typical Omni fashion, a couple of engineers decided to make their own OmniPads.

Kevin Steele created the OmniPad Doc Holder and the OmniPad Whiteboard. (shown above)

Robin Stewart demonstrates the unibody construction method for his OmniPad. (Flickr)

Features:

• Unibody Construction

• Gorgeous Duct Tape Housing

• Dry Erase Interface (OmniPad Whiteboard)

• Accepts most standard paper sizes (OmniPad Doc Holder)

• Powered by imagination

Full set on Flickr