The Omni Group

Gosh, I just can't tell if there's enough interest in OmniFocus...maybe we should scuttle it in favor of OmniCrashDoubler 1.0, the app that crashes when you try and enter descriptive text about why your original app crashed in the first place! But only after you hit the only button available, which is helpfully labeled “crash”.

OmniCrashDoubler will retail for $249.95. No volume discounts. OmniCrashDoubler Pro includes a second button labeled “manifest odor of startled skunk”.

In all seriousness, thank you so much for all of your comments and emails regarding OmniFocus. We really, truly appreciate it. A couple folks asked when we might have an early beta to share; while I wish I had a timeline to give you, that's just not something we can even guess at yet. I mean, we could guess, but we'd probably be wrong. Then you'd be all ticked off, and if there's one group of people we don't want to anger, it's the extremely productive folks who are both 1) poised to spring into Next Action and 2) armed with index cards that can be folded into little throwing stars at a moment's notice.

We're going to be as open as possible about our development progress with OmniFocus, so I expect that we'll be asking you more questions in the future (and maybe sharing some screenshots at some point). Thanks for all your participation, and stay tuned.

Release Notes:

• New Features

  • Tasks have a priority setting which assists in leveling
  • Behavior of the enter key is now user configurable
  • Notes from OmniPlan can now be exported to iCal and included in HTML exports
  • Mini-Manual now available through the Help menu
  • The Show Overview command in the View menu provides an abstract view of all top-level tasks and groups in the project
  • Showing dates on milestones in the Gantt chart is now a separate View Options setting from showing assigned resources on tasks
  • When you drag tasks, they now snap to time units based on the zoom level
  • Duration and Effort totals added to the list of things that appear when left clicking at the bottom of the main window

• Major Fixes

  • Importing
    • We've fixed a number of issues related to importing and exporting MS Project files.  While we have fixed some problems, we know we still have more work to do, so please keep sending us bug reports!

  • Leveling
    • New leveling algorithm

      • The new leveling algorithm is faster, produces fewer hangs and behaves more predictably.
      • The details are:
        1. Order tasks by priority then by position in the outline
        2. From lowest priority up, position any tasks with absolute end limits (meaning they are locked or have an end constraint or are a prerequisite to another task which is locked or has an end constraint) as _late_ as it is possible for them to fit, so as to reserve worst-case space.
        3. From highest priority down, position tasks as early as allowable and will fit. This includes all the tasks in step 2 as well, which may be moved earlier because of this. If any tasks fail to fit at all, save them for later.
        4. With only remaining 'failed' tasks, from highest priority down, perform the same operation as in step 3. Some may fit now because a lower priority task with a reserved position in step 2 may have moved during its part of step 3. While any tasks are able to be positioned, repeat step 4 again with remaining failed tasks.

  • Calendar

    • Moving time blocks in the work schedule no longer misbehaves
    • Fixed crash when pushing arrow keys in Calendar Mode
    • Modifying time blocks no longer causes them to disappear

  • AppleScript Dates
    • The OmniPlan AppleScript library now handles NSDates correctly

  • Inspecting Multiple Tasks
    • It is now possible to edit multiple tasks at the same time

  • HTML Templates

    • Standardized and cleaned up the HTML in exported projects
    • Exporting resource information is more configurable
    • CSS for our exported HTML has been moved to a separate file
    • HTML exports are more compatible with Firefox and IE

  • Overhauled print options
  • OmniPlan's print settings now accept 2-digit months

• Minor Fixes

  • Option-clicking a group in the Gantt view will now expand all hidden children
  • Resources no longer disappear from calendar view if you make the window tiny and resize it up again
  • A group's completion percentage now updates immediately when adjusting a subtask
  • Grouping tasks will now renumber properly
  • Assignment pane of the Task inspector now shows all resources
  • Users can now convert between task, group, and milestone from the contextual/action menu

Download OmniPlan

We just got an email from our esteemed pal Wrong Size Glass, who wrote:

Hey Gals & Guys,

I was just wondering what ever happened to the search for a good 'code name' for the Omni â??GTD appâ???

Well, WSG, therein lies a tale! Yes indeed, a long and convoluted tale with mighty dragons and heroic journeys and a scrappy little dog and â??

You know what, never mind all that. I'll just cut to the chase and tell you the name we've decided on, for now at least, is OmniFocus. I see that commenter Cameron suggested that very same name just two days ago in response to this entry, so I will take that as a Positive Sign that “OmniFocus” is an okay name.

(Especially since no one liked my idea: OmniFu. What? It's a perfectly cromulent word.)

OmniQuest was a big contender, although some of us felt it was a little too gamey. Not in the sense that it smelled weird, but…oh, you know, the dragons and heroic journeys and so on.

So: OmniFocus. It has a name. It has a team of engineers working on it, a user interface guru mocking up modes and widgets for it, and a product manager whose Herculean job it is to herd this whole mess towards an elusive ship date.

Now for your participation! Many of you have already sent us some really, really useful feedback on what you're looking for in this type of personal organization application. What we wanted to ask this time is, what are you currently using for this purpose? Index cards? Kinkless and OmniOutliner? Other apps/other analog methods?

If you wouldn't mind sharing, we'd love to know. Hit us up in the comments section or by email.

I have to say, I sort of hate it when one of our apps is in public beta for more than a few weeks. It starts to lose that new-car smell, you know? People ask when the release date is scheduled for, and we have to give elaborate shrugs in response. As Omni's official marketing weasel, the Elaborate Shrug is my least favorite reply to draw on. I much prefer the Sarcastic Eye Roll (as in, “When are you going to offer a PC version?” *eye roll*).

We had hoped to be announcing the final release of OmniPlan by now, but, well, people are still helping us find things to be fixed. Sometimes a hearty beta period just can't be avoided, because you guys don't just find bugs, you provide the kind of feedback that's necessary for us to come up with the best UI solutions and feature compromise.

The Omni Group is made up of a lot of perfectionists, honestly. The process of putting the metaphorical fork in the app because like it or not, at some point we've got to declare it D-U-N isn't easy.

So, I think your mission is clear: stop reporting bugs with OmniPlan.

Oh, I'm just kidding. Please, put down the stones.

Actually, we really need your input, so please keep sending it our way. Especially if you encounter problems using MS Project with OmniPlan, either by opening Project files into Plan or vice versa – let us know about those. The Project stuff is definitely one of our current bugaboos, and more examples are a good thing.

Speaking of examples! (Ah, yet another seamless, buttery segue.) I have a sample OmniPlan document for you, based on a few requests we've had. This one provides an example of dependencies, which are tasks that depend on other tasks. For instance, you might use a dependency for calling out that “Design UI” is a prerequisite of “Freeze UI”, or that “Eat Delicious Chocolate Cupcake” is dependent on both “Bake Delicious Chocolate Cupcake” and “Buy Massive Bag of Flour”. And so on.

Mmmmm. Cupcakes.

Anyway, the document covers the basic concepts of dependencies and different types you can have (and how to create them). If you have some thoughts on other sample documents you'd like to see for OmniPlan, talk to us!

Click for a link to the .zip file:

Release Notes:

• Stability

  • Fixed failure to load files with corrupted named style references.  Now, if a named style isn't found with a given unique identifier, we'll fall back to looking up by name.  If that fails, we'll just drop the reference instead of failing to load the file at all.
  • Fixed crash when clearing the undo stack after having dragged in a URL and then undone that change.
  • Exporting to flat file formats (CSV, plain HTML, etc.) will no longer raise an error when the document has metadata set in the document Spotlight inspector.

• Interface

  • The row expand/collapse animation will no longer be slow if you are holding down shift unless the animation is due to a mouse click.  French keyboard users (where numbers require shift) will no longer see the slow animation when using the keyboard shortcuts to expand and collapse rows.
  • Tabbed inspector icons should be colored appropriate for the selection before the first time the inspector is loaded.
  • Styles applied to the document title tag as well as styles applied in the document header view should now be reflected in the printed output.  In the case of a conflict, the style attribute set up in the document title view will win.
  • The spell checking panel 'Correct' button will now replace the first misspelled word when it is in a different row.
  • Inherited styles are now listed at the bottom of each section in the style attributes inspector.  This this follows the most specific to least specific layout in the rest of the inspector.
  • Clicking on an attachment, pausing, and then dragging will now drag the attachment as a file reference instead of as a text clipping.

Download OmniOutliner 3.6.2 beta 1

Download OmniOutliner Pro 3.6.2 beta 1

So, Rowan managed to concoct an Omni…ummm….hand sign while at WWDC. I hesitate to call it a gang sign, as we're really more of a club (cookie for the reference). Umm, actually we're not a club at all, we're a group.

Yup, that's us—- The Omni Group.

So anyways, we're all practicing really hard so we can flash this and I dunno, maybe get into a rumble with the Adobe folks.

The nice folks over at Computer Systems Odessa (they make ConceptDraw) have made available a web service to convert files from the binary .vsd file format to the Visio XML document format, .vdx.

So, if you're stuck with a bunch of native Visio documents but don't have access to Visio 2002 or Visio 2003, you can use this to convert them to the XML format.

Check it out.

I expect this to become a very handy thing to have at hand, thanks and kudos to the ConceptDraw folks!

Martin Jaggi brought up a good point on the OmniGraffle mailing list: it would be nice to resize objects in OmniGraffle as if they were an image, not a set of objects. LinkBack makes this possible.

Say you have a nice bunch of objects in OmniGraffle you'd like to scale while having the text, stroke width, corner radii, and such scale along with them:

If you just select them all and Shift-drag the corner handle, the lines stay the same width, the corner radii stay the same, and the font size stays the same; not quite what you want:

But! If you instead select them and choose Copy As PDF from the Edit menu, you can paste a representation of all the objects as a single object:

Then you can scale the PDF like a normal image; everything scales with it:

Here's the cool part: because the PDF contains LinkBack data, you can double-click it to open an OmniGraffle window with your original objects! Edit them however you like, and when you hit Save, the PDF version updates!

Oh, OmniWeb 5.5—How shiny and final you are!

However, the recently released revision is not the point nor purpose of this post.

Yes, gentle reader—It's me again, and it's about coffee. The Omni Espresso Machine has finally been fixed. The machine's broken status (as well as its top placement on the Colbert “On Notice” board) has plagued me for far too long now.

Not that I have anything particularly against the Zoka coffee shop next door, it's just that I'm the sort to demand that I be self-reliant when it comes to caffeination, so this whole “You can't make your own coffee/NOT YOURS” routine really got me down. Heck, I even took a week off in hopes that when I returned, OmniEspresso 2.0 would have been declared final and all that.

No such luck.

Apparently the whole dealio was so dire that we had to call in Doctor Duff to save the day. Duff, who is like some sort of coffee machine witch doctor, some sort of mocha medicine man, this koffee kahuna, a layer of hands for lattes, umm, well I just ran out of synonyms so I'll just cut it out right there. Anyways…

The good Dr. appeared, spent some time examining the chi of our espresso machine, and then took off again, presumably to go get an assortment of chicken heads or ashes of baristas gone past, and returned a few days later. Deftly deconstructing its innards, like a modern-day MacGyver he mended the machine without a part left over, and I'm pretty sure the thing can make rocket fuel now as well.

So, at long last, all is well in the world, or at least my little awakened apse of it, so long as nothing else goes wrong with the machine I can go back to spending my time on OmniGraffle, apart from the occasional klatch.

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