Late last summer we traveled down to Rancho Alamo Camp 1 to talk to Michael Werk, owner and operator. Before (an alleged) retirement, Michael spent days traveling and directing commercials for TV. Now he’s owner/operator of a vineyard, winery, farm, and Bed & Breakfast.
Michael uses OmniFocus to directly support his vineyard and winery projects, and it can get pretty deep. The folder structure might seem a bit daunting at first glance, but multiple varietals over many years can lead to a lot of the same tasks, timeshifted by days, weeks, and years.
It’s safe to say he has a system.
The Story
We talked to Michael in Los Alamos, CA. It was a pleasure to get to know Michael, Natalie, and Max during our visit. A huge thanks to Kalyra Winery, too.
Another round of private (but just about public) testing!
In the past year we’ve written a bit about both 2013 and OmniOutliner 4; now we’re ready to let you see the next generation.
Who?
We’d like anyone who uses OmniOutliner on most days to give it a go. Have a particular template or document you live out of? Try your workflows in OmniOutliner 4 and let us know if bugs happen. Real-world information here is extremely critical to a great public release of v4.
It’s important to note that OmniOutliner 4 has been completely rewritten and requires Mountain Lion (10.8).
If you’re in and have the time, sign up for the private OmniOutliner Test. We’re sending out the first round of invitations…
When?
Right now! Well, shortly after you sign up anyway. We’d like to get tens to hundreds of thousands of private testing hours before starting a “Hey stranger, come download this app” public test.
If you emailed us on your own accord in the past few months, you should have already received your invitation to test.
Is there anything missing?
Not missing, but possibly buggy! In February we finished adding the bulk of support for AppleScript (rewritten!) and printing (rewritten!), and you’ll see audio recording show up soon, too.
And the final version?
We’ll know when we’re ready after hearing from you. We want OmniOutliner 4 to be just as stable as OmniOutliner 3, and a good group of private testing with a lot of unique usage helps a great amount. Sign up, give it a go, and let us know what you find!
Many thanks to everyone who was able to show up on January 31st — we all enjoyed talking to you.
Don’t forget to sign up for the private test to participate in the OmniFocus 2 process. We won’t send a lot of mail, but we should have more information soon.
This is usually when we start making announcements about Macworld for next year. We have some different news this time, though: we’ve decided not to have a booth presence on the show floor in 2013.
This was a tough decision to make, as Macworld gave us our first real “meet and greet” with our customers. One of our first shows was back in 1998 when we shared OmniWeb for Rhapsody, alongside Bare Bones Software (they were showing off a pre-release of Mailsmith), to a new set of OS X-ready users. Our presence included a good chunk of the company, a few computers, and a shared booth.
We do software, and increasingly the Expo Hall at Macworld has been shifting toward hardware. To better serve our customers, we decided to pursue a more personal way to interact and talk software during the show.
(By the way, Macworld still has a full lineup of great talks, workshops, and special events.)
So it’s very important that we continue to make that happen. We’re stepping out and trying something different.
But we’ll still be around
This year we went to a new thing called Userconf. When we heard Chase from 37signals talk about their experimentation with showing off Basecamp, live and in-person to customers, we were intrigued. With OmniFocus (and all of our apps), introducing the app in a minute is difficult (You put things in completable projects after you do a brain dump and use contexts as places or things to do them!), so having 30 minutes to talk about specific features or concepts would be pretty cool.
So, we’re going to try it with The OmniFocus Setup! You can put your name and a question in for a session, and we’ll do the best that we can to see everyone. (With the caveat that, depending on interest, we might have to filter them a bit.)
What The OmniFocus Setup is
So, on January 31st, we’re going to schedule a full day’s worth of OmniFocus “learning sessions” — usually 1-on-1s, but we’re going to turn popular topics into group sessions, too. Someone that really knows how to use OmniFocus (an Omni person) will be there to talk through workflows, features, or whatever, on iPhone, iPad, or Mac.
We’re also going to be doing another thing that we’re waiting to announce until early January, so follow us on twitter if you’ll be around during Macworld. (Remember the get-together during Macworld 2007?)
And a Little Bit More (Update!)
We’ve had a pretty great response to our plan for 1-on-1 learning sessions. A few other people (you’ve probably heard of ‘em) were excited enough to volunteer their brains and know-how, so we’ve added a bit more to our day.
If you’ll be in the area this year, please join us for a set of talks on OmniFocus with Kourosh Dini, Sven Fechner, Dina Sanders, Tim Stringer, and Mike Vardy. Afterwards, we’ll have a panel discussion. All the details here, and check back later for even more!
In OmniFocus for iPhone 1.15, one of our most-requested features went live: TextExpander Touch support.
There are so many different ways to use TextExpander with OmniFocus so I won’t even begin to offer suggestions here, but there’s a lot of reference material out there to link to.
Kourosh Dini goes a bit further and performs some calculations inside action titles, especially for “waiting for” contexts.
Michael Schechter goes one step further, completely automating a clipped email by populating context and project fields, but it won’t work in OmniFocus for iPhone. Sorry!
Finally, a very useful rundown of TextExpander by Thanh Pham. Mac-centric, but nearly everything works with TextExpander Touch & OmniFocus.
You can find out more about TextExpander Touch (and the original Mac variant) at Smile Software.
Dan W., current holder of the newest Omni employee title, uses TextExpander extensively:
Everyone appreciates a timely response and sometimes it’s required. I can’t always reply to messages right away—when I need to research a topic or have a conversation with someone—but OmniFocus helps track this and doesn’t bug me to send that email until all the required tasks are done.
TextExpander snippets for me are most useful in creating template email skeletons. Each email draft is an OmniFocus task and the task’s “Notes” field is my scratchpad for composing my message. My basic template sets up a text based form that includes ‘To:’, ‘CC:’, ‘Subject:’ and ‘Message body:’ with some space to write the body, it even places my curser just after the message body so I can start typing in the right spot. TextExpander Touch can’t prompt for user input like the Mac application can (an iOS limitation), so I rely on these text based prompts.
‘To:’ and ‘CC:’ remind me to call out who I’m looking for a response from and who’s just listening in. Plus, they also work as a reminder when I think of someone else I’d like to bring into the thread. As I’m composing my draft I have snippets to create URL links from my clipboard, properly case Omni product names, or include my email signature.
When I’m ready to send, I’ll copy and paste the template fields into an email message and hit Send. I also remind myself in the email template to create a “Waiting for response” placeholder task once I’ve sent the email.
OmniGraffle’s drawing tools have changed! In a great, really-saves-you-time kind of way.
You’re no longer entering a “mode,” per se, but rather enabling an additional set of drawing tool buttons.
The big change here is that we’re moving back to a more desktop-esque experience and away from our first assumptions about touch. At least for the drawing tools.
Joel, OmniGraffle’s PM, wrote a post about this when it was first implemented:
The interaction model is very quickly moving towards the established behavior on the desktop despite being a touch interface — Mimicking the desktop behavior is proving to be a huge win most probably due to its familiarity. While some may say that thinking of finger touches and the like as if they were a mouse click is flat-out wrong on a touch device, maintaining expected results here is more important (emphasis added), in my opinion. It’s the same application on two different platforms, and should act in similar fashion to itself unless completely warranted by the features of the platform it’s running on.
It’s very easy to use, even if you’re unfamiliar with OmniGraffle for Mac:
You’ll see the new Draw button in the toolbar, far right; tap it.
Tap the tool you’d like to use; tap again if you’d like the tool to stay active.
The tool inspector button lets you style the tool you currently have selected, before you draw the next shape, line, or text.
You can collapse the Draw Toolbar whenever, or select the Selection Tool to modify objects without closing the toolbar.
Last week, our friend Lotus came to the office one last time.
She was a cat, with a single-digit employee number, who neared 19 [years old] — that’s just shy of 100 in equivalent “human” years, according to the Cat Calculator.
She came to us via a friend of the company, Sonja, who relayed the “Origins” story:
Nearly 19 years ago I was walking home from the grocery store and this little black fluffy cat started walking with me and whining oh so pitifully. I petted her and gave her attention and she wandered off but in the next few days I saw her again and she followed me all the way home. She knew a sucker when she saw one. I took her upstairs and gave Sean plaintive eyes and so we made up some Found Cat posters. We already had two cats, so an online friend agreed to foster her for a while.
Lo and behold someone called saying this was her cat, her apartment had been broken into and some of her cats had gotten out. Hooray, she arranged with the foster person to get her cat back. Yet, within two weeks this same cat was out again and following me around again. I carried her upstairs and called the owner. She said something to the effect “oh she was acting differently so I didn’t think she was my cat so I let her out.” I was livid. She said something, I think, about how she could take her back if I wanted but there was no way I was going to let that happen.
While trying to find a permanent home for her we realized, oops, our youngest cat, Fnert, was an unfixed male and we better do something about that pronto. But that fluffy black kitty was on to us and, I kid you not, the night before his appointment she went into heat and I was woken up by screeching and howling and walked into my living room to find the deed being done.
Shortly after, the peeps at Omni agreed to take her in, knowing she was probably pregnant. Five adorable kittens arrived.
The rest of her history is with Omni but I have always been proud that this stray I rescued ended up having such a sweet deal. My thanks to all the Omni peeps who gave her such a great and long life.
A few months ago she went into a wonderful retirement home (courtesy of Andrew’s house—thanks Andrew!) and did some sunbathing, meowing, pétanque-playing, day-trading, and White-Russian-drinking. She was never really close to her offspring, so there weren’t grandkittens to spoil.
She had kittens during the 1994 Olympics, each named after a figure skater: Elvis, Surya, Bonaly, Viktor. She’s survived by Viktor, her firstborn, who lives with Ken.
A bit more about Lotus (and loss) at the personal space of Bill, our UX lead.
Thanks for helping with some of our company’s culture, Lotus, and for welcoming us to the office every morning for over 18 years.
OmniGraffle 5.4 shipped in early June with a new set of keyboard shortcuts to zoom in and out of the current canvas. The new shortcuts follow the iWork suite: ⌘> to zoom in, ⌘< to zoom out. This is a deliberate change, but we’ve heard from a few people who’ve suggested other shortcuts — the biggest being the Adobe CS set.
Dr. Drang wrote about keyboard shortcuts in OmniGraffle a year ago, somewhat in the same vein.
But! You can definitely change things around, if you need to, by adding a few Application-specific shortcuts in the Keyboard pane of System Preferences. (In fact, you could add a setting so that any application that has a Zoom In menubar item follows the same shortcut. Caveats: In OmniGraffle and Numbers, ⌘+ is used for making font size larger; other applications might be using it for other things, too.)
Anyway, how’s it done?
Select the Keyboard pane of System Preferences, followed by Keyboard Shortcuts. Select Application Shortcuts in the list on the left.
Click the + button and add Zoom In to the Menu Title field.
Add a shortcut. In this case, to match Adobe’s suite, use ⌘+. (Side note, this is actually, of course, ⌘=. As far as I can tell, OS X won’t ever show + in place of =, even with ⇧.)
Do the same thing (+ button, Zoom Out, and add ⌘–) for zooming out.
You’re done! If you’d like that to be global, leave “Any Application” in place.
Hopefully you’re all enjoying Mountain Lion! Here’s to the early adopters.
We receive a lot of emails and phone calls every day. Some asking for Feature X, others to report a bug. A fair amount, though, are stories from customers about how they use our applications. Each story leaves us feeling grateful to be in the business.
About a year ago, we decided to bring a few of these to video.
This story is about Nick Finck, Deloitte Digital, and how they’re using OmniGraffle to design user interfaces and information architecture.
The Story
We’ll let the video do most of the talking, but Nick—who is User Experience Director at Deloitte Digital—has been focused on mobile UX and IA over the last seven years. In that time, OmniGraffle has been the tool to design interfaces to “help (people) and make their day better.”
We talked to Nick just south of the Fremont Troll. For more from Nick, check out his blog.
PS: If you’re in the mood for an OmniGraffle poster, Nick created a very printable document of OmniGraffle Shortcuts.
The #1 requested feature customers sent in for OmniPlan on the iPad has just hit the App Store, so go grab it!
Tap and hold a project in the document browser to email a PDF of the Gantt chart (a full canvas, or paginated) or an HTML report (a task report or a resource report for a standalone web page.)
Instead of emailing, you might also send it over to an app like Dropbox to put it in a shared folder.
If you have an AirPrint enabled printer, you can send your Gantt chart there, too.
