And we're back! With another installment of OMNI APPS—IN ACTION, which I have to say is almost as awesome of a title as my toddler's favorite DVD on the face of this earth, HORSES—CLOSE UP AND VERY PERSONAL.
(Spoiler alert! The movie features horses.)
This week we've got a really interesting OmniGraphSketcher use case to share with you, thanks to Troy Payne, a PhD candidate at the University of Cincinnati. He's working on a grant for the Ohio Office of Criminal Justice Services, and is currently offering data analysis and problem solving services at no cost to small and medium-sized Ohio police departments. He writes,
One suburban police jurisdiction thought they had a huge increase in robbery in 2009. They asked for our help to determine why. When the research team dug into the problem, we found that there wasn't an increase at all, on average. A handful of 2009 months were higher compared to 2008, which probably accounts for the perception of an increase. But the overall trend was not one of explosive increases.
Troy's team worked on different ways to visualize this information, beginning with a basic OmniGraphSketcher line chart that plotted raw counts for each year for which they had data (2006-2009) by month:
He goes on to explain,
That line chart is difficult to interpret because there isn't a clear trend line. Frankly, it's a confusing mess, with each year overlapping all the others. This is very common with crime counts, particularly in small jurisdictions where the counts are low. Here, the monthly robbery counts are in the single digits and are highly volatile.
We needed to simplify this chart or our message would get lost.
OmniGraphSketcher to the rescue!
We decided to create an area that was ±1 standard deviation from the 2006-2008 average for each month and plot the 2009 robbery counts against that. While not a true confidence interval in the statistical sense - because we're plotting the standard deviation instead of the standard error - this does provide a cleaner visualization of how "typical" 2009 robbery counts are:
The take home message: Robbery was pretty much where we'd expect in 2009. There was not a large increase in robbery.
Hooray for robbery not increasing, right? Hooray for data visualization!
Want to know how Troy created that chart? You're in luck, because he was nice enough to tell us:
I have a spreadsheet in Excel that has the crime counts by month for each year. I created columns for the average and standard deviation, then created columns for the average ±1 standard deviation.
Then I had to get the result into OmniGraphSketcher. For me, the easiest way to do this was to copy/paste one series (i.e., column) of data at a time. I started with the low end of the shaded area. I hid the columns B-E in Excel, selected the month and mean-1s columns, hit command-c, switched to OGS, hit command-v. Then, in the OmniGraphSketcher inspector, I clicked the connect points button. Next, I repeated that process with the mean+1s column, making the upper bound of the shaded area.
The shaded area itself was created using the fill tool in OmniGraphSketcher, which is delightfully simple to use. It just works.
It's taken me *far* longer to describe what we did than to actually do it in OmniGraphSketcher. And that's the power of the app. I can quickly create stunningly beautiful charts that convey the ideas I need to convey. Instead of focusing on how to fiddle with the software, I can focus on how my message should best be transmitted to my audience.
Aw, man. We love happy customers SO MUCH. Thank you, Troy!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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
Hey all, just a quick note to let you know that Lynda.com has added a comprehensive OmniGraffle training course to their library, available to all Lynda.com subscribers.
From the course description:
In OmniGraffle Professional 5 Essential Training, Jason Osder shows how to go from idea to fully developed illustration with this powerful diagramming tool for the Mac. OmniGraffle is designed to handle everything from diagrams, process charts, and web site mockups, to page layouts, and even info-rich map graphics. Jason demonstrates how to organize this wide variety of documents using canvases and layers, and work with basic diagram elements such as shapes, lines, and text. He also shares timesaving techniques, such as using pre-made stencils, snapping for auto alignment, and auto layouts, so users can create documents quickly and efficiently. Advanced skills for the professional user are also introduced, including adding interactivity and developing custom shapes. Exercise files are included with this course.
Topics Include:
? - Creating and manipulating shapes
? - Finding and adding stencils
? - Applying diagram styles
? - Importing content
? - Displaying diagrams in Presentation mode
Duration:
- 1.75 Hours
You can learn more about Lynda.com's subscription programs here. Enjoy!
I was going to write a post about managing New Year's resolutions, then I thought maybe the topic of New Year's resolutions has gotten kind of tired and no one even does them any more, then I thought well it's still a good subject because everyone's got goals no matter what time of year it is, then I got distracted by this photo and laughed for about ten straight minutes because HAAAAAA, then my boss was all hey have you got that new blog entry written yet, and I was like OH YES INDEED JUST FORMATTING THE HTMSQLCSSWTF FOR THE WEB INTERFUNCTION.
Anyway, if you happen to have made some resolutions this year, how do you plan to stay on top of them? With some software, perhaps? Maybe even some Omni software? (Is my incessant eyebrow-waggling and elbow-jabbing getting annoying yet? HMMM?) Let us take a look at some of our fine productivity applications, with creating and managing resolutions in mind.
First, OmniGraphSketcher. If you're anything like me the idea of spending your free time creating graphs is about as appealing as, oh, creating pie charts. Which is to say, not all that appealing. Unless there's actual pie involved.
At first I wasn't sure how to translate my goals into graphs, but the more I thought about it the more ideas popped into my mind. Here's an example of the progress I've made towards one of my 2010 resolutions, which is to run a half marathon on February 28th:
These charts document the training runs I did in November and December, with the bar chart representing the miles I ran, and the line graph along the top representing my pace.
Now, as our lead OmniGraphSketcher developer gently chided me, this isn't exactly a best practice example, because they have different y-scales. Which I think means I should have created separate graphs for pace and mileage to make it more clear what I'm analyzing. But I kind of like the way it looks as is, so you'll just have to pardon my rebellion.
I'll be honest, I hadn't played with OmniGraphSketcher much before putting these documents together, and what do you know, the things we say about it are actually true! It's super easy to use, it's nowhere near as painful as certain other programs that rhyme with Shmexel, and the results are very pretty even if you're kind of a mouthbreather when it comes to data visualization. And hey, how motivating is it to actually see the steps you've made towards completing a goal? Much more rewarding than, say, counting your foot blisters.
Moving on to OmniFocus! OmniFocus is probably the most obvious choice for goal management, and the key to making the most of it is turning those high-level ambitions into actionable next steps. There's, you know, a whole school of thought on how to do this (you may have heard of a little system called Getting Things Done?), but the idea is to spend some time thinking about what you need to do in order to keep that resolution. A nebulous, undefined goal doesn't do you much good, right?
Bad:
Better:
One option for managing your big goals in OmniFocus is to keep an action simply titled "Review 2010 Resolutions" (or whatever), and set it to repeat every few months. Note that dragging a project or action into the note field of another will create a link back to the first item, so you can add little shortcuts from your resolution items to their respective projects.
Lastly, OmniGraffle! Perhaps unsurprisingly, the overall Omni response to my request for personal goal-focused information that I could slap on our public blog was not unlike a Zork session:
>SEND EMAIL
Time passes.
Eventually after some truly pathetic begging on my part (the things I do for this blog! And you thought I just posted silly links and typos!), one of our esteemed Support Ninjas, Kris, sent over a really neat OmniGraffle document that's modeled after a chalkboard he and his partner have in their home. The top and bottom circles represent their individual goals, with their mutual goals in the yellow center circle.
Goals inside the circle are targeted for 2010, goals on the border are within the next year or two, and anything outside of the circle is scheduled for the two to five year range. "We use this to be clear about what our priorities are and where we're at with them—not to mention all the secret juju that comes from visualization," said Kris, right before he whipped a throwing star at my head for mocking his desire to learn the banjo.
He also shared these tips:
"The cool thing about having a Graffle doc of this is that it's easy to edit, rearrange, re-prioritize and add new things as they come up... then reflect those changes at home. I can keep a PDF copy of the file with me so that when I'm out shopping (for instance) I can pull up the ol' Goal Board and evaluate the purchase against my priorities. Also, the actual Graffle doc has this really cool capability where you can assign an action to an object—clicking an object (with the selection tool) will open a URL, a file, run an applescript, etc. I use this to link to things that I desperately want—again, the mystical power of visualization. I also use this to link to my OmniFocus projects that reflect these goals."
Awesome, right? Don't ever question the power of visualization, people.
So! How about you folks? Do you have any tips to share for making all your MMX dreams come true?
We're not too fancy to admit when something in one of our apps doesn't work quite right. For instance, I don't know if you've noticed but when you hit the "pour me a large caffeinated beverage" button in OmniGraffle, nothing happens. Don't worry, I've totally filed a bug on that.
In the current version of OmniFocus, there's some wonky behavior with stalled projects. (Yes: wonky. It's a technical term.) It's something we plan to fix, but in the meantime I'll walk you through the problem and a suggested workaround.
Let's say you're reviewing your stalled projects by choosing "Stalled" in the sidebar filter in order to display all projects without any available actions. In my example, I've got a project titled "December fitness events", and sadly for my fitness, it is empty.
Woe.
I'd like to go ahead and add an action to this project, but when I click the project and hit return, poof! It disappears altogether.
Now, I could take this as a sign that I wasn't meant to do any fitness events in December and instead focus my attention on devouring as many holiday-themed cookies as humanly possible, but here's the thing: the project isn't gone, it just thinks it has an action item now. Even though it's an empty action, because you haven't yet typed anything, the project is officially no longer stalled.
So, here's a workaround for that issue, as suggested by our super-smart Support Ninja, Kris:
First, set your Clean Up preferences (in Data Preferences) to "Clean Up Inbox items which have: Both a Project and a Context".
Next, set your sidebar filter to "Stalled" as before. As you review everything and decide to add new actions to the empty projects, bring up the Quick Entry window and add the action there.
Since you've told OmniFocus to keep things in your inbox until both the project and the context have been set, you can assign an item to a stalled project and your project will remain stalled until the context is set as well. The purpose here being that you can continue to see the list of stalled projects (ie, no more mid-workflow disappearing acts) until you're done organizing your actions.
Once you're done reviewing your stalled projects, you can return to the inbox and assign contexts for everything. Voila! Your actions get filed into their proper locations, and your stalled projects are no longer.
I hope that was at least marginally useful for you OmniFocus users, even if you haven't encountered this particular issue before. And hey, would you like to see more workarounds/tips/tricks in our blog? Let us know, all suggestions are more than welcome.
