Exciting news! OmniFocus has won a Best in Show award at the Macworld Expo this year. Oh man, I LOVE Best in Show. You know, “Now tell me, which one of these dogs would you want to have as your wide receiver on your football team?”—seriously, such a great movie.
Er, wait. Wrong Best in Show. This is the annual Macworld feature presentation that honors those products that have pushed the boundaries of innovation, quality, and overall creativity. Well, that's even cooler than a mockumentary about dog shows. Here's what the good people at Macworld wrote about OmniFocus:
“Plenty of Mac programs will help you manage your to-do list (including a few that are built right into OS X), but OmniFocus ($80) is one of the nicest ones we’ve seen. Like many of these to-do apps, it’s optimized for the Getting Things Done task-management system: That means Omnifocus makes it easy to capture new to-do items anytime one occurs to you, and it lets you assign to-do items to both projects and contexts (the latter being GTD-speak for where or how you’ll accomplish the job). Omnifocus also integrates nicely with OS X: it’ll sync with iCal, you can add tasks via e-mail, and you can search your to-do list with Spotlight. You can view your upcoming tasks from multiple perspectives—by project, context, as part of a project-planning outline—yet the interface is nice and clean.”
Wow, right? BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE. Not only that, but it seems OmniFocus also received an Editor's Choice award from The Mac Observer. TMO's first Editor's Choice Awards include 12 products that they feel represent the best of the best of the products being shown at Macworld, and we're thrilled to be included on their list. They wrote:
“As with seemingly all of The Omni Group's products, the company has developed a very Mac-oriented solution with OmniFocus that works very well, is easy to use, and is a cut above competing products.”
Congratulations to the other Awards winners, and a huge thank you to Macworld and The Mac Observer for the honors!
Just a quick note to invite you to stop by our booth and say hello, if you're going to be at Macworld this week. We're in #602, near the Nikon and Quark booths, and just a short mosey from the John Lennon Bus.
If you've been hemming and hawing over the exhibit fee, good news — you can get in for FREE using Omni's Very Special Exhibitor Code Link Thingie, which you can access here. Filling out that little form should give you a free exhibit pass, courtesy of Omni and the good people at Macworld Expo.
Hope to see you there!
After many months of development and countless blog posts providing you with murky updates on our progress, what else is left to say . . . except SWEET FAT HOT HAM, OmniFocus 1.0 is here!
Yes, OmniFocus has finally shed its beta-ness and it's all ready for prime time. Uh, we hope. I mean, ha ha, we're pretty sure it won't eat your hard drive or anything! We totally fixed THAT bug.
To those who boldly test-drove OmniFocus throughout the beta process, we owe you a huge thanks for all your helpful feedback. Thanks, too, to those of you who sent us feature requests and ideas for how to make OmniFocus the best darned OmniFocus it could be.
It's just going to get better from here: we have big plans for OmniFocus 1.1 - 2.0 in the works. In the meantime, though, we're pretty pleased with how 1.0 has turned out, and we sure hope you like it too.
On licensing:
OmniFocus is now selling for $79.95. OmniOutliner Professional license owners are currently eligible for a 25% discount off the OmniFocus license fee. Quantity discounts, educational, and family pricing are available at our online store.
You can download OmniFocus and use it in unlicensed mode (with no feature restrictions) for 14 days.
Other useful stuff:
• Watch the 15-minute OmniFocus Quick Start Video (180MB, 50MB iPhone version here)
• View our “At-a-Glance” handy-dandy Reference Chart
One more thing:
If you're going to be at Macworld next week, please come by our booth (#602) and say howdy! We'd love to meet you in person and answer any questions you might have. Well, unless they're along the lines of, “Why do you guys have such a lame blog?”, of course.
After twelve years here at 2707 NE Blakeley, Omni is moving offices—we've finally outgrown our beloved pet-detritus-encrusted building and we're moving on up to the . . . uh, let's consult a map for a second here . . . well, not to the east side, more like a southwesternly direction. And it's not really a deluxe apartment in the sky, more like a nice roomy new office building on the ground, so—yeah, just forget the whole thing where I was going to try and work in The Jeffersons theme song to this blog entry.
It's been a slightly terrifying effort to get everything packed up and either recycled or readied for moving; remember this thrilling list of Omni Attic Contents? (No? You say you don't read every single non-useful, non-product related blog entry we post? FINE.) I think we all received about thirty more emails just like that, except even longer, with even weirder items on the list (for instance, copying and pasting directly from a few messages: birthday candles, For Lease sign, “Goblin Green” spray paint, full can of baby powder). Big props to Molly and Trish, our office wranglers who have managed to coordinate all of the moving-related chaos without threatening to kill any employees.
(YET.)
(Also, I feel compelled to tell you that one of the older, more embarrassing games discovered in our dusty game archive shelves is called “Panty Raider”. Game description: you play as Nelson, an innocent bystander forced to help aliens in their search for supermodels in underwear.)
Tomorrow is our official move day, and we'll be settling into our new location starting next week. If you experience any delays in hearing back from us in the next few days, this is why. In theory we should be up and running again Monday morning, but that assumes no networking SNAFUs, employees wandering around looking for their office, or horrifying discovery that the new building is actually built on an ancient Indian burial ground. WAIT OMNI DO NOT GO INTO THE LIGHT.
Farewell Blakeley building, you have served us well. Sorry about all the cat hair we're leaving behind.
BIG NEWS OVER HERE PEOPLE. After over 500 sneaky peek releases, which so many of you have been kind enough to give us feedback on, we are finally drawing the OmniFocus early release cycle to a close, with a bright and shiny final release date in mind: January 8, 2008.
As Ken wrote in his message to the OmniFocus mailing list, “We could probably go on indefinitely in this state: you continue to give us lots of great ideas for ways in which we could improve the software further, and it's hard to resist implementing a good idea when we hear it.”
For REAL. This whole process has taken a lot longer than we had initially guessed, partially because of all the amazing feedback we received along the way. Oh, the spirited conversations that OmniFocus has sparked as we've tweaked the way the application works, and that's just here in the office. I won't get into details, but take it from me: you do not want to use the term “bucket” around here for a while—lest you trigger a frothy-mouthed debate, liberal use of the Caps Lock key, and eventual frantic emailing back-and-forth of walrus images.
Anyway, we've decided not only to commit to a final ship date, but also offer you a special deal. From today until January 8, you can pre-purchase OmniFocus at its introductory rate of $39.95. Once the final version ships, OmniFocus will sell for $79.95—so buy now, and save 50%.
But Omni, you might be thinking. What will I actually get if I buy it now? This sounds like one of those BS marketing schemes where if I buy in the next hour I'll also get a set of steak knives.
Ha ha! Come on, you know us better than that! We would never give you steak knives, because then you might use them to stab us.
If you buy now, you'll get a license that will work in the final version of the software. We'll send you an email when the final version ships, so you'll know exactly when it becomes available.
In the meantime, you can continue to use the beta version, which we're opening up to the general public today. While the betas will still be expiring (so you're encouraged to download more recent versions and not be stuck with bugs we may have fixed), you can easily set your OmniFocus preferences to automatically grab the most recent builds.
Also, if you are an OmniOutliner Professional license owner, you get an additional 25% discount on top of the current introductory pricing. Quantity discounts, educational, and family pricing are all available on our online store.
Thank you for helping us make OmniFocus such a great piece of software, and thank you for your patience during our development cycle.
And now, the relevant links:
For those of you who may be haunting Apple's Leopard countdown page, counting each and every second until you can get your early-adopter mitts on the newest OS; watching the guided tour over and over and maybe considering expanding your wardrobe to include more long-sleeved black t-shirts; working on your subdued, yet expressive hand gestures; pondering the sex appeal of various reflective surfaces . . . for YOU, I have good news: Omni has updated nearly all of our software so that when you start running Leopard on Friday (at 6 PM exactly), your favorite Omni apps won't let you down.
Well, to be clear, I mean they'll run on Leopard, I can't guarantee they won't let you down in other ways (for instance: not calling after a first date, failing to put their dishes in the dishwasher, consistently adding possessive apostrophes to plural nouns, etc).
In a nutshell:
• Current final releases of OmniWeb and OmniDiskSweeper are Leopard-ready
• Current beta releases of OmniFocus, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, and OmniDazzle are Leopard-ready
• OmniPlan has some Leopard Issues that it's working through with talk therapy and an experimental drug regimen, but we hope to offer a 10.5 update in the next few weeks.
A full compatibility report is available on our Leopard status page, along with some fancy illustrative buttons.
Just a quick reminder to let you know that the OmniFocus evening event at Tekserve on the 27th has a few spots still open, so if you're interested in coming by (there will be food! And beverages! And possibly an interpretive dance performance!*) please make sure to sign up ahead of time.*Well, probably not. Hopefully not.
Today's post is the first in an ongoing series I'm calling OmniFocus: What We've Learned So Far (or OF: WWLSF, if you prefer acronyms). As we move slowly but steadily towards a feature freeze and public beta, I thought it would be interesting to get some input from various people here at Omni on things that have gone well, as well as things that have sucked challenges we didn't anticipate—basically, the ups and downs behind building a piece of commercial software.
We're going to start out in the technical arena, so I apologize if code-talk makes you yawn so hard you accidentally drool a little. Here is Omni's engineering perspective on an important lesson learned during OmniFocus's development process, which can be boiled down to: we ♥ CoreData, but not as a primary file format.
With more on this subject, here is Tim Wood, hater of Aeron chairs, terror of the Unreal Tournament battlefield, and OmniFocus team lead:
There are many things that are great about CoreData, but using CoreData as a user-visible file format was really painful. Since inception, our xcdatamodel file has had 92 revisions, with most of those exposed to several thousand people via our automated builds. Most of these changes aren't things that users would notice; we often add or remove precalculated summaries, denormalize data or generally change the underlying CoreData representation to make our app easier to implement and tune. Yet, with CoreData, the SQLite mapping would be busted beyond hope by adding or removing a column.
Manually building code to migrate between model versions is really not an option. If CoreData had a Rails-like migration facility where columns could be added and removed trivially via SQL ALTER statements, it might be feasible, but it still wouldn't be good. CoreData explicitly disclaims any support for direct access to the various stores, so it isn't a public file format and hinders our users from easy access to their data. In practical terms, we all know that a liberal application of the letter 'Z' will get you most of the way to accessing your data. Still, this isn't ideal.
What CoreData is great for is building an optimized cache of your data, fetching against it and then binding it to your interface.
A couple of other key observations are that we already needed a public file format for Export (we chose a custom XML grammar, but that's merely a detail). And, using a variant of the public file format for the pasteboard format is a great way avoid writing and testing more code (as is using your pasteboard archive/unarchive code to implement your AppleScript 'duplicate' support…)
Given that, I tweaked our XML archiving to support writing a set of CoreData inserts, updates and deletes as a transaction. We can then write out a small fragment of our content in a new gzipped XML file inside our document wrapper. The structure of our XML transactions is very simple with a key feature being that we can trivially merge a big batch of transaction into a single XML document that contains only the final set of objects as inserts.
On startup of OmniFocus, it scans the transaction log in the user's document and builds a cache validation dictionary that contains:
• Version of Mac OS X
• CoreData's version
• SVN revision of the application
• The last transaction identifier
We then open up the CoreData SQLite persistent store and peek at its metadata. If it isn't an exact match, we close up the persistent store, and rebuild the entire thing by importing our coalesced transaction log in exactly the same way we would import one of our backup files.
There are many extra implementation details (locking, catching the insert/update/delete notification, undo/redo vs. AppleScript, two-phase commit between the XML and SQLite, ...), but we are really happy with the central approach.
Some of the fun things this gives us:
• You can run the same build of the application on 10.4 and 10.5, switching regularly and not worry if CoreData is going to ignite your SQLite store.
• You can run multiple builds of OmniFocus on the same data and not lose anything (more work may be needed for major file format upgrades if there ever is one).
• If we do screw up one of our automated builds and mess up cache updating code, the user's data doesn't get touched and it's just fine on the next build.
• Until the transaction log is compacted, we actually have the full record of edits and we could hypothetically implement persistent undo, allowing the user to rollback to yesterday's version…
• ... or calculate the changes they've made since some point in time.
The last point is really interesting and I'm hoping to make good use of that in the future for things like computer-to-computer synchronization (no, I'm not promising anything)!
For those who might be interested, Ken recently answered some interview questions over at MacApper. Topics include Ken's Old Skool Programming Street Cred (respectably nerdy!), his thoughts on being Omni's CEO, and upcoming development plans.
Check it out when you get a chance!
If you live in the New York area, I hope you'll come by the uber-popular independent Mac shop Tekserve on September 27 around 8:30 PM for what is shaping up to be a very cool event featuring OmniFocus. Merlin Mann will be there, schooling you on how to get all productive and organized and smelling minty-fresh, as well as our own Ken Case and moving-gods-willing, Ethan Schoonover.
Random Trivia: Tekserve was once featured on Sex in the City. And now I've used the word “sex” in the Omni blog, which is frankly something I never thought I'd find myself doing. Well, other than “sexy”, as in “boy howdy them Omni apps shore are sexy-lookin”.
ANYWAY, directions to Tekserve can be found here, and more information about the seminar is posted here. We hope you'll join us if you're able to do so, it should be both educational and fun. Funducational!
**Update** Please note you'll need to register for this event, here's the handy link for doing so.