The Omni Group

Hey, who's attending Macworld 2010? Show of hands? Sweet, I knew we couldn't be the only ones. We don't need no steenking Apple keynotes to have a good time, do we folks? Yeah, I got your keynote right here. Party! Party! Chug! WOOOOO!

Oh wait that's a Keystone® Light. Never mind.

Anyway, for those planning to register soon, the nice people at IDG have given us a discount code to pass along to you guys. This exclusive code, which I have carefully copied and pasted below using special tongs, provides the first 100 people to use it with a free expo hall pass or 15% off select conference programs.

The code is AGO18988, and you'll want to 1) guard it with your LIFE, and 2) enter it at the top of the registration page (which you can access by going to the Macworld 2010 website and clicking the green “Register Now” button).

You can also access the discount via this handy-dandy link.

We hope to see you there! We'll be the ones complaining about how our feet hurt, despite having ponied up for the fancy carpet padding that's apparently filled with endangered chinchilla pelts, based on the per-day rental price. Viva Macworld Expo!

While OmniFocus definitely does not require you to be a Getting Things Done® devotee in order to make good use of the software, it's true that Omni developed OmniFocus with the GTD system in mind. If you're new to the work-life management system of GTD and wondering just exactly how you can implement the methodology in OmniFocus, we now have an awesome new resource for you: the OmniFocus, GTD, and You white paper.

But Omni, you're saying. White papers are so boooooring. They use words like “extensible” and “data-driven” and most of them are just cheesy marketing materials in disguise. WAHHH.

Listen, I can't hear you when you use that tone of voice. And stop worrying, because this is a totally useful document written by our stellar documentation folks, and the marketing weasels didn't even touch it. (I wanted more cowbell, but would they listen? NO.)

The white paper gives a thorough explanation of how the GTD concepts of Capture, Process, Organize, Do, and Review are handled by OmniFocus, and you don't need to have any previous understanding of the Getting Things Done system to read it. As a sometimes-committed, sometimes-not OmniFocus user myself, I found this white paper really helpful and inspiring.

The good folks at DavidCo not only helped us make sure the white paper was accurate, but are also promoting OmniFocus as the recommended Mac GTD solution from their online store. We want to thank them for working with us and making OmniFocus available to a wider GTD audience.

So what are you waiting for? Go forth and download, and get some best-practice ideas for making the most of your OmniFocus document.

Gathered from around the webernet for your viewing pleasure, here are a few links that may be of interest to you, O Faithful Omni Blog Reader!

• A six-part series of short video tutorials for OmniGraffle at Alexander Interactive.

• At Konigi.com, version 3 of their OmniGraffle Wireframe Stencils.

• For those who manage web development projects, a free OmniPlan template from Simon Surtees, and a method for using OmniPlan to price a freelance web dev job from Journal-ism.

• From John Kendrick's blog, a post on using people as contexts in OmniFocus. (As for me, I only have one personal context in my OmniFocus document, titled “Clive Owen”. Its related actions: “Heave wistful sigh while absentmindedly twirling hair”, “Rent Sin City . . . again”, “Doodle I ♥ Clive on Trapper Keeper”, etc.)

• A nicely balanced account of Jeremy's experience with both OmniFocus and Things.

• And just for fun and general awesomeness, a recipe for peanut butter bacon cookies. Duuuuuuuuuuuuude.

Liz, one of our esteemed Test Pilots, was reading Programming Ruby with Cocoa (because this is what the smart people at Omni do in their spare time, probably while I'm watching The Soup and snarfling about how Joel McHale makes fun of them there Kardashian girls, haw haw haw) and noticed a shout-out to Helpify, an Omni/William Van Hecke Joint.

What's Helpify, you ask? Well, duh, we DID mention it exactly once almost twelve months ago on our blog. I can't believe you missed it! Next you'll be telling me how you don't read “every single post” because “the ones by your marketing person suck”.

As a reminder, Helpify is a cool Python tool our User Experience Lead, Bill, built for formatting OmniOutliner 3 files into help documents. I'm not totally sure if he used actual pythons to assemble it, or what—I'd probably know more about this stuff if I didn't watch so much crap TV—but apparently it lets you author help contents with automatic formatting, indexing, and navigation. The properly formatted help books can then be dropped into your app.

Remember, in this country, you gotta make the help first. Then when you get the help, you get the power. Then when you get the power, you get the women.

Ahem. Anyway! You can read more about Helpify on Bill's original post, and download Helpify here.

Lots of news today, people, so I'm going to try and keep this short so you can skip straight ahead to the part where you sit back and bask in that new-software smell.

Updated: OmniFocus! OmniFocus 1.7 is now available for your downloading pleasure, and includes a bevy of interface improvements designed to make everything just a little more smooth and simple. We also re-worked Perspectives, hopefully making the process of working with them much easier. Overall sync performance has been improved (yay!), and you can now view a list of the attachments in your OmniFocus document, and delete them as necessary to speed up document syncing even more.

Also updated: OmniGraffle! OmniGraffle 5.2 includes support for support for portables with Multi-Touch trackpads, so you can now pinch to zoom in or out, resize a selection, or rotate a selection. We also added fixes to tables, shared layers, and dealt with some stability issues.

Also also updated: EVERYTHING ELSE. OmniFocus, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, OmniWeb, OmniPlan—hold on, typing cramp . . . okay—OmniGraphSketcher, OmniDiskSweeper and OmniDazzle have all been updated with support for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

You do not EVEN want to know what time the engineers went to bed last night, is what I'm saying.

Everything can be downloaded from our handy-dandy Snow Leopard status page. Enjoy!

The other day I heard one of my coworkers mention OmniPlan's gibberish-izer, and while it gave me pause I figured they were referring to some code-related whatchamadingie and calling attention to the fact that I was out of the vernacular loop would only serve to underscore the misperception that marketing weasels are kind of mouth-breathy when it comes to technical stuff.

(I mean, clearly this isn't true—just look how masterfully I threw out the term “whatchamadingie” just now! Surely that makes up for my ongoing failure to make any sense of words such as “grep”, “sudo”, and that embarrassing misunderstanding regarding “zombies”.)

As it turns out, though, there is in fact an actual gibberish-izer built into both OmniPlan and OmniGraffle. It probably has a real feature name and everything, but since no one bothered to ask ME what to name it (hello, MUMBO-JUMBOTRON! Could there be a better name? Don't step too close, now, or you'll get my sheer unrelenting genius all over you, and that stuff will stain), I'll just tell you that it's a clever bit of functionality that garbles the data in the documents you send us.

If you choose “Send Feedback” from the Help menu in OmniPlan, you'll get an option to include a copy of your document with your email. If you'd like to gibberish-ize it, OmniPlan will replace all your tasks, resources, and notes with random boring names like “Task 17” and “Resource 5”. This way, we can take a look at the structure of your document and help you figure out any problems you might be having, but all your confidential information is protected.

CONFIDENTIAL HIGH-RISK INFO! OMG!

UNEXCITING SANITIZED INFO. WHEW.

With OmniGraffle, we give you the option to convert all text to gibberish (text is actually replaced with little x's, like dead fish eyeballs!). So, whatever your nefarious plans and diagrams may be, you can always email them to us . . . without, you know, sharing everything with us.

The More You Know™!

First things first, if you haven't already seen this incredible video, may I recommend doing so? You'll want to load it in HD full-screen mode, let it buffer, then just kick back and relax. (Via the always-awesome Kottke.)

Next up: what's Omni been doing lately? Let me break it down for you bullet-style:

• Preparing for Snow Leopard! Engineers are madly adding Snow Leopard updates to all our shipping apps, with the goal of having everything ready the day Snow Leopard is. I don't exactly know how this works, if they just . . . physically stuff an actual leopard in there, or what (aw, who's a snuggly? You are!), but they seem very busy.

• Starting sneaky peeks of OmniFocus 1.7! LOTS of changes in the works, and you can get the rundown here. Warning: running an alpha version isn't for everyone, but if you don't mind, you know, living on the edge a little, the very latest builds are being constantly made available via our sneaky peek page.

• OmniWeb 5.10 sneaky peek updating! Speaking of sneaky peeks (the more I type that term, the goofier it sounds. So SNEAKY, these peeks), the work-in-progress version of OmniWeb, 5.10, has just been updated with the latest WebKit (from Safari 4.0.3) and has several improvements to its built-in software update (including the ability to ignore a particular update).

Questions? Feedback? Cool links to share? Chat us up in the comments.

We talk a lot about all the awesome things you can represent with OmniGraffle, like wireframes, functional flow charts, heck, even your breakfast. You can use OmniGraffle to fill out forms, communicate ideas, or design a strategy game. Or put together a crochet pattern! Or plan your pool room!

It's our most versatile piece of software, and the one that's often hardest to describe. At least for someone like me, who might hear “diagramming” and think, hurrrrrrgh, org charts. Blech. Thanks but no. Process diagrams? Yeah, well, if I need someone to document the nightly 3 AM wakeup calls in our house, I'll . . . oh wait, I already did.

(PS: good lord, I made that document in 2006. And we then had a SECOND CHILD. Who is STILL WAKING US UP.)

(PPS: This is why all my blog posts suck. I haven't slept in three freaking years.)

Anyway, for all the fancypants diagramming and information communication-fu OmniGraffle is capable of, it also happens to be a perfect program for page layout. I've used it to create holiday cards, brochure mockups, missing-pet posters (more than one, even, because either our pets are dumb or we are terrible owners), and most recently, a basic flyer for software resellers.

It's easy to get text and graphics exactly how you want them to look, the smart guides make lining everything up a breeze, and you don't have to wrestle with a desktop publishing app to get professional-looking results. Yeah, you could do something like this in a word processor, but why not repeatedly stab your eyes with a grapefruit spoon while you're at it?

Do you ever use OmniGraffle as a page layout program? What sorts of documents are you making with it?

I'm heading to Chicago for the BlogHer conference tomorrow, and as part of my last-minute preparations (which include charging an embarrassing number of electronic devices, because god forbid I become digitally detached for ONE HOT SECOND; also, packing several candy bars because 1) calories totally don't count when consumed during travel and 2) humans taste terrible, which is why if you crash in the mountains and are forced to consume the flesh of your fellow passengers, it's best to have a Snickers on hand for a nice palate-cleansing dessert), I've entered my travel-related information into OmniFocus.

My plan is to have a well-organized list of helpful information that I can access via my iPhone while I'm on the road and at the actual event. I started by creating a folder in my project list titled “BlogHer”, and then creating a few relevant projects.

In each project I entered the individual pieces of information I wanted to have on hand, like flight times, conference panels, sightseeing locations, and evening events. I put all associated data in the notes sections: panel descriptions, flight confirmation numbers, addresses, and so on.

Then I assigned contexts to everything, with one parent context called “BlogHer”, and sub-contexts titled “Travel” (where all my car service/flight/hotel information went), “Exploring” (the sightseeing stuff), “Agenda” (all the conference panels), and “Parties” (evening events and their locations).

I synched everything to my phone and it all looks like I expected, which is always a good thing. I can select the “BlogHer” context to view all those sub-contexts . . .

. . . and click on one to have the exact information I need, wherever I am.

This all seems pretty handy, but I can't help wondering if there's a better way to organize all this stuff. Those of you who have used OmniFocus while traveling, how do YOU set up your document? Any tips for making this even more useful?

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