The Omni Group

Users, do we have news for you.

OmniPlan has a new Sneaky Peek* out there for everyone to enjoy — especially if you’re an importer/exporter.

Our Microsoft Project import/export functionality has been rewritten, so we’d love it if you relayed any and all bugs back to us; if you can send us the Project file as well, that’d be even better. We really want to make sure this new process works well.

(For those wondering why it’s been rewritten: with the Mac App Store, we had to move our Project importer/exporter functionality to a plugin—installed separately—because it required Java. We want that to be built-in.)

Also new and notable! We’re getting started on multi-project support.

If you select an Address Book entry (with an email address) for a resource and then publish your plan files to our Sync Server, we’ll determine just how much that person can do for each project they’re participating in. All other Sync Repository projects are leveled as you update them.

Speaking of leveling: we now automatically level resources on the fly. It can be turned off, though, by visiting the Project menu.

Keep in mind that we’re not yet done and there may be issues we’re not aware of. (Issues we’d love to hear about!) If you need help getting it figured out, shoot us an email. Multi-project support has been a popular feature request for a while now, and we’re happy to push out what we’ve come up with so far.

It’s now also possible to resize Gantt chart bars; they’re now equivalent to the “Whole Document” font size.

“Anything else?” you’re asking. Well, sure. We’ve fixed quite a few bugs!

*Standard warning: Our Sneaky Peeks are not for the faint of heart. There will be bugs. We want to know them.

Macworld is almost here!

Join us, if you would, on January 26th, 27th, and 28th at booth 802. (There’s no need for a map; it’s extremely close to the Exhibit Hall entrance.)

We won’t beg, but we’d love to see long-time users, show our stuff to some new users, and give away some Pretty Cool Things we had made up.

This is actually our 12th straight attendance, but I’m calling this Number One, because Frakes. And Ihnatko! No big deal.

There’s always something worth checking out at Macworld — at the very least, follow along with our Instagram (omnigroup) feed or our posts on Twitter: @omnigroup. We’ll be posting awesome things throughout our stay which will all be newsworthy, I’m sure.

Also: OmniPlan for iPad previews and a quick presentation on Friday at noon!

Take a gander at our presentation lineup by heading over to our permanent Macworld page, or read ahead.

Lastly, if you know of a fantastical ramen or dumpling place we should check out while we’re in San Francisco, comment or email!

Here we are

Almost two years ago, we opened registration for a brand new service: the Omni Sync Server. It was introduced slowly, of course, shared via email to folks who had trouble with MobileMe sync conflicts or setting up their own WebDAV server. Next, we invited users via Twitter and our OmniFocus forums to expand our base a bit more. (We survived that!)

At that point, we didn’t know whether the service would be free. We announced publicly in December of 2010 that it would. It isn’t free for us—about five or six folks here have had their hand in the design/implementation/upkeep/engineering of OSS—but definitely worth it. But! it’s reasonably fair to say that OmniFocus paired with OSS makes for the best experience.

So, in the past two years, it’s been pretty great — with a few exceptions. We’ve taken it down to physically move our servers to the next rack over; we’ve had a few cases of the early-morning Mondays (I’m so sorry I said that) because of I/O difficulties when sign-ups started ramping up. (Technical note: we were also using our first Mini to redirect everyone to the appropriate machine; it was overwhelmed.)

We’re now fine-tuning the system and preparing for worst-case scenarios as much as we can be:

• What if a Mac Mini jumps off the rack at our colo facility?
• What if a drive dies on each Mac Mini at the same time?
• Other relatively bad thing.

Soon, after we get all of that figured out, we’ll be taking the Sync Server out of beta. Edit: It sounds a bit like we’re not currently backing things up; we are! We’re also finalizing our EULA — we want something that we like and which our lawyers will tolerate. (We’ve removed the beta badges in our apps in preparation for this; the site’s warning remains.)

What’s next?

We definitely have some ideas for a great new OmniFocus feature or two involving OSS. We also have plans to use it more and more for all of our document-based apps (see: everything else), and will move away from importing/exporting and over to syncing of documents.

Twitter-folk can stay up-to-date here with news and announcements.

We really like iCloud, but there’s still a lot we, as developers, just don’t know. Hopefully we’ll find out more in the coming month(s).

Some data from sync clients

We tweeted yesterday that exactly 31,500 users were active on our servers in the last 8 days. The most interesting bit, I think, is the most popular OS X machine: the 2011 Macbook Air. 10%, with 7% of the 13” and 3% of the 11”.

Five folks do their OmniFocusing on an Xserve. (There’s nothing wrong with that!)

Marco Arment, developer of Instapaper, occasionally shares some of his iOS statistics. I’d suggest heading there for a better breakdown of what it actually means for developers, but this is interesting:

• 92% of the devices using our Sync Server are completely up-to-date on iOS 5.0.1.
• Because of rounding, we can say that nearly 100% of our users are running at least 4.2.1
• 68 devices of 38,741 are running something less than iOS 4.

And finally, for the OmniFocus geeks:

Keep in mind that these are active devices in the last 8 days. In our latest versions of OmniFocus, we decided to up our minimum OS version to 4.0, so users that are less likely to upgrade their OS might also be less likely to explore syncing.

From all of us in the support department here at Omni, Happy Holidays! (The rest of Omni also wishes you the best.)

This is a very quick note to thank everyone for, over the course of 2011: 41,805 emails, 3,763 phone calls, and a decent amount of tweets. And a few more before the 31st, I’m sure!

While you’re off visiting with family and friends, try not to let us waste the day away, though. We’ll still be scattered about on our Macbooks and iPads—at slightly reduced hours—while we visit family around the US. (Also, Iceland and Great Britain!)

Phone support, too. Leave a message during normal west coast business hours and we’ll call back ASAP.

That’s all. Happy New Year!

OmniPlan v2.0.3 is a free update to licensed OmniPlan v2.0 users. This release includes a critical fix to project syncing with an OmniPlan server repository. If you'd like to check out the full release notes, click here. 

We love hearing from you! You can reach us by tapping using the Send Feedback feature in OmniPlan, sending email to omniplan@omnigroup.com, tweeting to @omniplan, or calling 1-800-315-OMNI or +1 206-523-4152.

To start using the new version, you can use the built-in software updater in OmniPlan v2.0 or you can download it from our website here.

As soon as Apple announced Siri, everyone who owns OmniFocus for iPhone let us know just how much they needed these two tools to work together.

A couple of friendly productivity fiends took matters into their own hands and figured out that Siri could send emails to the OmniFocus inbox on their Macs.

We could have said “Yay, Siri and OmniFocus can work together” and gone back to our long-term projects. Instead, a couple engineers got to talking “You know, if we… and then the server… and…” “Wow, I think that would totally work!”

So, if you have an iPhone 4S and OmniFocus for iPhone, you can stop typing items into your inbox, and just say whatever comes to mind.

David “MacSparky” Sparks put together a couple videos to show you how it works.

OmniFocus & Siri from The Omni Group on Vimeo.

Here’s more detail on how to get set up:

OmniFocus + Siri configuration from The Omni Group on Vimeo.

If you tell Siri a time, OmniFocus will set the due date. If you specify a location, OmniFocus can assign it to the corresponding context.

OmniFocus + Siri: Location from The Omni Group on Vimeo.

We’ll be standing by on the usual support channels if you need any assistance. Twitter:@omnifocus, Email: omnifocus-iphone@omnigroup.com, Telephone: 1 800-315-OMNI

Hello never-a-rescheduled-task folks!

We know everyone’s preparing for winter by scouring the area for tire chains (we live in Seattle, and snow isn’t our thing), but we have to let you know about our recently-finished OmniPlan tutorial videos. Kinda like Geordi La Forge has to increase efficiency in the warp core by 17%.

The set of Basic videos were published about a month ago, but the Advanced just recently went live.

The Advanced series includes an extremely simple explanation of Hammock Tasks — if you’re not using them yet, I’m sure you will after.

One more thing: we’re currently on OmniPlan 2.0.2 (release notes), and we’re very close to releasing another minor update for bug fixes.

As always, shoot us a tweet @omniplan or email support if you have any questions or concerns.

Howdy, everybody! With a new release of iOS and new iPhone hardware, there’s been a ton of excitement and news this week; fun times!

In addition to all the cool new stuff Apple’s released, we’ve been able to build a few things using their toys that we hope will also be pretty exciting; I wanted to take a few moments and tell you about one of them. Specifically, the new location-based notifications we’ve added to OmniFocus for iPhone 1.12 and OmniFocus for iPad 1.4!

One of the first things we added to OmniFocus was time-based reminders; it wasn’t too long after that that folks asked for location-based ones as well. In fact, the first request we got for location-based reminders was back in May of 2007, before we’d even shipped version 1.0 of the Mac app! Over the years, we got more requests, especially once OmniFocus for iPhone and iPad appeared - wouldn’t it be great if the device you were carrying around in your pocket could tell where you were and remind you of the things you needed to do?

The first couple versions of iOS mostly made use of location data on maps. It was useful - you could create a context for a pharmacy you used, add the address, and see a dot on the map if any actions needed doing. You had to remember to look at the map screen, though. With iOS 4, it started to look like the pieces we needed to add the feature were coming together - that version of the OS had the ability to monitor location information and notify an application when the device was in a certain area. We did some preliminary work towards implementing location reminders; the feature worked and didn’t use much battery charge, but it became apparent it wasn’t as fast or as accurate as we hoped. We decided to pause work on the feature.

We were pretty excited by some of the changes Apple made in their recent hardware, though; they found a way to improve the accuracy of location monitoring without using more power. Specifically, the iPhone 4 (and 4S) include a feature called “region monitoring”, which lets them track the devices’ location via GPS without running down the battery. iPad 2 models with 3G also have this capability. Unfortunately, devices released before then don’t have a low-power way to monitor their location as accurately, so they won’t be able to use this type of reminder in OmniFocus. (The Reminders app included in iOS 5 has the same limitation.)

Still, if you have a device that supports it, the location reminders can give you an extra nudge, helping you to complete actions you might otherwise forget. Because battery life is a top priority, though, it’s important to remember that the location is only being checked from time to time. If you pass through an area quickly (by driving past it on the highway, for example) you may not get an alert. It’s also important to note that the regions being monitored are fairly broad - the smallest “distance” setting still corresponds to about one city block, and things get more broad from there. Hopefully in the future we’ll have never-fail pinpoint-accuracy location monitoring, but we’re not quite there yet.

Since we shipped this feature, we’ve gotten questions from some customers that are seeing the “your location is being monitored” indicator more often than they used to, and it’s true that it’ll show up more often. As long as you have an available action in a context with a location attached, OmniFocus will stay subscribed to location information, activating that indicator.

The folks that are concerned by this are usually worried that their battery will be drained more quickly, and in previous versions of iOS, that would have been the case. In iOS 5, though, you shouldn’t have to worry as much. Behind the scenes, iOS 5 is handling things. We can’t know the exact details of how it works, but Apple’s stated goal was to be reasonably accurate while minimizing battery drain. The location monitoring indicator is mainly to help you manage your privacy; avoiding battery drain was a useful side-effect. But in iOS 5, the device is better able to conserve the battery.

It may also be helpful to know that OmniFocus’ map view also shows the indicator: that view determines your location more precisely than the location reminders do - you will see some battery impact there. In fact, shortly after shipping the iPhone update, we discovered that the Map view doesn’t remember to stop monitoring your location after you close the view; that actually can cause battery drain! Thanks to the folks that reported this problem - we’ll get an update out that fixes that as soon as possible.

For more details on location reminders, check the new help pages; they’re accessible from the Settings screen in each app. In the meantime, I hope this post helps you decide if location reminders will work for your purposes. Have ideas, suggestions, or concerns? We’d love to know what you think! Drop some comments here, or email our support ninjas; you’re also welcome to ask questions in our forums or on Twitter. Thanks, everyone!

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