Coming in the next post: details on the OmniFocus Macworld Get-Together Thingie, Which May or May Not Involve Party Hats. Stayed tuned!
In the meantime, I wanted to share this actual email exchange with Omni's technical support department:
Subject: [Bug Report] Water Outside Building
Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2006 23:41:50 -0800
To: support@omnigroup.com
From: “David”
Ticket: 130265
Product/Component: Omni Development, Inc.
Classification: UI/Usability
Reproducible? Y
Error: A large (4-5 inches deep?) puddle was present outside Omni Group's office earlier tonight.
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Wait for large amount of rain and power outage.
3. Exit Zoka onto NE Blakeley Street, heading in the direction of 25th Ave NE.
4. Note lack of lighting outside building, due to power outage.
5. Accidently step into deep pool of water next to Omni Group parking lot.
6. Notice wet pants and shoes.
7. Take sad bus ride home with wet pants.
Expected Results: Stepping onto concrete.
Actual Results: Stepping into deep puddle.
Workaround: Leave Zoka from the opposite door, heading towards 30th Ave NE. This workaround is not optimal, as it requires that the user navigate around University Village Mall in order to reach University of Washington's campus.
Patch:
*** blakeley.street Thu Dec 21 19:48:09 2006
—- blakeley.street Thu Dec 21 23:31:26 2006
***************
*** 1,4 ****
Zoka
OmniGroup
- Puddle
Street
—- 1,3——
....and the response from one of our Support Ninjas, Joel:
David-
This is less of an Omni bug and has more to do with the COSFrameworks, as all we really do is take advantage of the easements provided (as do other companies such as Zoka) and when there is a decided *lack* of a leak such as the case here, well, the water tends to pool up and sadly there's not much we can do about it until COS fixes it.
I have heard tell that in future releases garbage collection may be able to take care of such problems, that remains to be seen as I doubt leaves shall be considered in this schema and I'm not sure if independent GC (as is done now) will be able to or be willing to accept the challenge.
A more simple workaround would be to cross Blakeley somewhere between steps 3 and 5. I see you have no step 2, which is puzzling and preventing me from reproducing this bug here. A much more complex solution would be for Omni and/or Zoka to move to another location (such as ~/Blakeley/ instead of /Blakeley/).
Thanks for the feedback, and hope that helps.
Joel Page
Support Engineer
The Omni Group
Well, I certainly hope you all had a happy whatever-you-might-be-celebrating and are on the mend from overdoses of baked goods and festive family gatherings. Merry Festivus, Omni Blog Readers!
So, we are considering an OmniFocus/GTD get-together at Macworld, just to meet with those of you who are going to be in town and might be interested in chatting about…oh, I'm not quite sure yet. Personal Productivity Applications: Their Concept and Execution, maybe. How To Make OmniFocus The Best OmniFocus It Can Be. Something like that.
We have no idea how many of you to plan for, though, and we haven't made any decisions about venue or dates or whether to include party favors or anything. Therefore, we're hoping you can help us out; if you're reading this and thinking, hey, I'm going to Macworld! Hey, I would love to talk with Omni about this OmniFocus thing, if only to harass them about its ship date! – then please, let us know. Drop us a line in the comments section or send a quick email, okay?
Download it here! And getcher license here!
Behold: OmniPlan 1.0 has shipped. And our Support Ninjas are READY.
Of course, now you're probably afraid to email them…because the monkey might get you.
As if that's not enough news for one morning, we have lowered OmniWeb's price to $14.95.
Also, don't forget our new quantity discounting system on the online store (buy two or more items and get 5% off your order, per additional item, up to a maximum of 30%)!
Also ALSO also, from today until the end of December, OmniPlan discounts are available to those of you who have purchased at least one other Omni product. For every product previously purchased (sorry, bundled software on Apple machines does not count), there will be an additional 5% off your OmniPlan purchase, up to 30%. Email us the license information from your software to get the discount.
Clearly, we've gone completely insane around here (especially the support staff). I recommend buying up some software before we come to our senses, or the monkey devours us all, whichever comes first.
Tomorrow, tomorrow, we love you, tomorrow! It's only a dayyyyy awayyyy!
Why thank you, I do have a beautiful singing voice, don't I? Like melodious church bells, one might say. Or a dying goat. You know, whichever.
So! OmniPlan is shipping tomorrow. We are all greatly relieved completely sick of betas really looking forward to making the final release available to you guys.
By the time a product finally ships, there have been so many months of feature definition and coding and UI reviews and documentation and bugfixing, it's almost sort of anticlimactic to just…post some stuff on a website. There should be fireworks, I'm thinking. And maybe a tuba.
Well, since we don't have those things, when you see OmniPlan go live tomorrow, please imagine some fireworks, a tuba, and the musical intonations of a dying goat accompanying your download.
We've also made some changes to our online store that will be available tomorrow. Basically, we added a quantity discounting system that – as long as you are purchasing 2 or more items at the same time - gives you 5% off your order, per additional item, up to a maximum of 30%.
Jeez, did that make any kind of sense? So if you buy a copy of OmniPlan as well as copies of, say, OmniDazzle and OmniWeb, you will get a 10% discount on your order.
Or, if I switch just for a moment to marketing weasel-ese: buy more, pay less! (Sort of!)
Also, for license-holders of PMX, FastTrack Schedule, Merlin, ConceptDraw Project, there will be a $60 rebate available to you if you license OmniPlan. You'll need proof of purchase for those apps, which you'll need to send to us. There will be an Official Rebate Form posted tomorrow, which may not warrant a tuba accompaniment, but perhaps an oboe?
ANYWAY. Congratulations to everyone that's worked on OmniPlan, and many thank-yous to those of you who beta-tested for us.
Come back tomorrow for hot-off-the-presses shipping software! Go ahead, crash our website with your many many downloads! WE DARE YOU!
(Did that work? How about if I double-dog dare you?)
Years ago I worked for a Very Bad Software Company (no, they weren't located in Redmond). My job involved creating millions of graphics-heavy PowerPoint documents with little in the way of information but lots and lots of colorful stock art depicting great success for the company we were pitching to. We offered several different “technology solutions” that were “powerful and extensible”. Oh, and they also “engineered a rich, sticky shopping experience”.
(I am not even making that up. Rich. Sticky.)
It took me a while, but I finally figured out we had no actual products. What our company owned was some proprietary knowledge about delivering media over the internet, and around that nebulous concept a number of solutions were dreamed up by the CEO, who either truly believed they existed or thought they could be built immediately after a purchase was made (I was never quite sure which it was, I think it depended on the alignment of the planets and the amount of reality distortion in the man's head at any given moment).
Those products were vaporware, pure and simple. They did not exist, the “features” they offered varied based on who the salespeople were talking to, and the half-built, buggy technology that was supposed to be the base of all these fantastic offerings did nothing more than crash your entire system and maybe the computer of the person sitting next to you for good measure. Then it went and kicked your dog.
In its current state, OmniFocus is a little bit crashy, too. Okay, maybe our internal nickname for OmniFocus is Crashy Von CrashaLot, That-Which-Triggers-Kernel-Panic, but hey, that's why it's not in beta yet.
But it's not vaporware. It's just not completed. There's a difference, and it has to do with being sincere about what we want to offer, and not touting magical features that we have no idea how to build.
The reason we've been open about the entire process isn't to generate hype (goat trail: the Segway was hyped. Zune was hyped. Mentioning a product a few times on a blog with a readership of…well, a smallish readership? Not hype, unless you want to greatly elevate my contributions marketing-weasel-wise, which is fine by me but then we'll have to discuss a new benefits package involving chocolate covered pretzels delivered to my desk on a weekly basis); it was initially to gauge interest and figure out if this product was a good investment for us. We could have done research on our own and maintained radio silence about OmniFocus, but we wanted to start a dialogue about it and get your feedback early on.
We are not trying to persuade you to avoid looking for other solutions, and we're not trying to unreasonably build up your expectations. I don't consider what we've been talking about with OmniFocus to be a pre-announcement, which is something typically designed to generate early interest in a product and hopefully build momentum towards the final release.
Being upfront about OmniFocus was not a PR activity, or a strategic marketing decision, or anything involving a slide presentation and the word “paradigm”. It was rewarding to tell you we were thinking about working on it, and it was awesome to get all your positive feedback, but now we're in the boring part of the process where we feverishly code and have UI meetings and chew the ends of pencils and there's just…not much news.
Think of OmniFocus like a movie that's being filmed. You read who is starring in it, you maybe see some stills from the sets, you forget about it for a little while, and all of a sudden it's in theaters and people are writing comments all over its IMDB page debating whether it sucks or rules.
Or something.
Anyway, I wanted to let you know that we enjoy interacting with you guys, that's why we started this blog. It's not solely a vehicle for Official Product Announcements, and I hope you can appreciate some of the more informal conch-bleatings. It's more like we're talking with you instead of just issuing press releases, you know?
Now, let me just wrap things up by saying: we are still considering the “Feed Rowan the Disgusting Food Item of Your Choice!” booth display at Macworld, so I hope you plan on coming by and visiting.
We've received a number of…um, spirited requests lately for an update on OmniFocus. As it turns out, when people are excited about a product that's under development, they really don't want to hear about your Wii-outings.
They probably also don't want to read an ongoing series of blog posts titled “Will Rowan Eat It?” (with apologies to Steve) featuring random disgusting food items being offered to Rowan, our developer who claims he can eat anything, with photos and zany commentary, and for that I say WELL THANKS A LOT, there goes my whole blog raison d'etre for December.
You people, with your demands for “actual news” and rejections of “filler content”. God.
Anyway, so OmniFocus. Okay, the news is this: we're still working on it.
The end!
(Now do you see why I had dreamed up that whole distract-them-with-Rowan thing? We were going to make him eat a live squid!)
Seriously, that's about all the news I have. Work continues. We're pretty slammed right now, resource-wise, with trying to get the final version of OmniPlan out the door, so hopefully once Plan ships we'll be able to ramp back up on OmniFocus. We do have two full time developers on OmniFocus right now, though, so there is progress basically every day.
We want to get a working version of Focus in your hands as soon as possible, something that provides the same basic functionality that Kinkless, Quicksilver and OmniOutliner do in one intuitive app, but this is Omni, and so we're also trying to curb our desire for OmniFocus 1.0 to include more of the in-depth functionality we really, really want it to have.
Just to make everything more confusing there are lots of features in Leopard that would help OmniFocus immensely. If, that is, 10.5 were available, and everyone was using it.
Anyway, please do stay tuned. We are hoping to have a little more to talk about during Macworld. Or maybe we'll just bring Rowan to our booth and let people feed him things.
I was trying to think of something for which I would be willing to 1) wait in line for 9 hours and 2) stay up past midnight (what can I say, I'm a devoted fan of sleep and sleep-related activities, such as snoring and/or drooling), and here's what I came up with: if iRobot came out with a new Roomba that could clean your whole house and make you dinner and also do your laundry, I'd wait in line for that sucker. Maybe even for 10 hours.
Sadly, iRobot has done no such thing yet (although I WILL NEVER LOSE HOPE), but for a number of OmniPeople, their own great and glorious much-anticipated product became available to a choice few this Saturday night:
Squii!
It required camping out until midnight, but don't go feeling too sorry for them; apparently, there was hot chocolate.
And cupcakes. No one told me there would be cupcakes.
I'm pleased to report their dedication paid off…
...and lo, much gaming commenced back at Omni HQ, until FIVE in the MORNING.
Never fear, we have not abandoned our software development in lieu of Wii-ing (admit it, at least one of you was reaching angrily for that Comment button to say BUT WHAT ABOUT OMNIPRODUCTNAME?); we work hard, and we geek hard.
More photos of the Wii-acquisition party here.
YET ANOTHER BLOG POST FROM OMNI!
I know, the excitement is almost too much to bear. Let's just all take a second before we head back over to that Caps Lock key…breathe…
OMG OMNIWEB IS ON SALE!!
(I am seriously going to sprain something, here.)
From today until the end of the month, OmniWeb is available for $9.95. That's 20 bucks off the normal price, so if you've been using the app in demo mode but loving all those handy features, now is the perfect time to get a license key of your very own. Licensed users get to customize their start page, among many other benefits (such as earning our nearly-stalkerish level of wove, sweet wove).
We also have discounted pricing for OmniWeb family packs and educations licenses, so tell all your Alternative Web Browser friends, okay?
Welcome to the third, and for this week anyway, final installment of “You Ask, We Answer!”. Brought to you by Diet Coke and the letter Q.
(Q for Qwality!)
Ayjay asked, many Mac developers have moved away from the use of drawers (especially now that Apple has taken them away from Mail) but you guys still feature drawers-a-plenty. What do you like about drawers? Have you thought about any other ways of implementing the functionality that drawers give you?
Ooh, good question. I had to call in the troops for help on this one, since my opinions on drawers are mainly limited to the kind you put your socks in. Ken, our CEO, and Bill, our UI Lead, put their heads together to answer you:
'We like drawers because they are a great place for content that belongs to the main window but doesn't necessarily need to be there all the time. They're great for “source lists”, from which you can choose what to view in the main window, like OmniGraffle's canvases or OmniWeb's tabs. Perhaps best of all, unlike a sidebar, you can show, hide, or resize a drawer all day long without affecting the dimensions or layout of the main content. And in Omni apps, you can move the drawer to whichever side of the window you prefer by Option-clicking the drawer button in the toolbar.
The problem with drawers, of course, is that the things just don't look modern. While the rest of Mac OS X interface was getting the sleek plastic or metal treatment, drawers are still as pinstripey, space-wastey, and noisy as they were the day they were introduced. Unless we want to cobble together and maintain some sort of custom fake drawer ourselves (or—gasp!—Apple actually updates drawers' appearance), we're going to have to get away from drawers eventually.
In meetings for our new products, we've talked about how to deal with this problem, and we think we may have come up with a good hybrid of the useful drawer and the sleek sidebar. You may end up seeing the first incarnation of it in OmniFocus, if we can do it right.'
Spencer says, I have had no luck at all with storing OmniGraffle documents in Subverson. The icon seems to contain an illegal character or something.
Here's the response from our OmniGraffle tech support/product manager NINJA EXTRAORDINAIRE:
'This is likely due to OmniGraffle saving the files out as packages, which other file systems can have difficulty dealing with.
OmniGraffle will automatically save a file out to a package if an image or external graphic is present in the document; there is a hidden preference to avoid this behavior that can be enabled from the command line. To get OmniGraffle to always save as a “flat” file (which will have no problems on other filesystems), open up Terminal.app and paste this in:
defaults write com.omnigroup.OmniGraffle PrivateGraffleFlatFile 0
Afterwards, new documents should always save as a monolithic file, you may have to perform a “Save As” for existing documents to convert them.'
Man, I'm loving this whole 'fob off the hard questions on other Omni employees' gig. What else have you got, commenters? Bring. It. On! *spirit hands*
Matt wants to know, Do you guys plan on fixing RSS anytime soon? Its a sometimes it work, sometimes it doesn't work symptom. Usually I have to relaunch OmniWeb to get it to recheck RSS feeds- it doesn't do it by itself even though I have it set to recheck the feeds every hour.
Dang, this one's less fun to answer. Turns out we've seen this issue and we're able to reproduce it. It's a bug that we're hoping to fix in an upcoming release, after the 5.5.1 update. Sorry about that!
Conor asks, Can you tell me if OmniFocus will liason with OmniPlan so that you can plan projects in OmniPlan and then download your personal tasks into OmniFocus? Also, are there any plans to allow Wintel users to edit OmniPlan? I work in a mixed-platform office and, while I do most of the project planning on my mac, it would be nice to enable other employees to check off tasks, etc.
We would love for OmniFocus and OmniPlan to work together that way, but I think it's safe to say that they won't for OmniFocus 1.0. We're trying to limit the scope to what we can actually get out the door in a (hopefully) reasonable amount of time, but it's definitely on the plate for future consideration.
As for Wintel users…well, we likely won't ever have a cross-platform version of OmniPlan, but you can use OmniPlan to export to .mpx, .mpp, and MSPDI .xml for sharing with Microsoft Project and other project management applications. You can also export to a .csv file for import into Excel, and if people just need to see the data, not update it, you can export the Gantt, outline or both into several different image formats (PDF, PNG, TIFF, JPEG). And! You can export to html – either a single table of tasks, or a mini-website with a Gantt chart, tables, and calendar files that can be imported into iCal, Outlook or other calendaring apps.
Thanks for all your questions, folks, and if I didn't get to yours this week, my apologies. Please stay tuned for an Exciting Announcement (note: your excitement may vary) about OmniWeb I will be posting later today. Same blog time, same blog channel.
