The Omni Group

The Omni Group is proud to announce the birth of a new bouncing baby app: OmniFocus for iPhone. Don't let its size fool you. It may fit in your pocket, but it's got all the same classy and nifty that you get with OmniFocus for Mac. For instance:

• Full featured as a stand alone iPhone app, or…
• Sync wirelessly with OmniFocus 1.1 on your Mac (via MobileMe or generic WebDAV)
• Same powerful management of your projects, contexts and actions
• Easy access to special lists such as Due Soon, Overdue, and Flagged

We figured that as long as we were building an iPhone app, we should take advantage of some of the neat stuff you can do on the phone. Here are some of the iPhone-only features that are shipping in the application right now:

• Dynamic location-aware action lists: Let OmniFocus for iPhone put together a list of actions that can be accomplished near to your current location!
• Photo capture: Save quick snapshots to your OmniFocus inbox. If you're using sync, these will show up in OmniFocus on your Mac.
• Voice notes: Sometimes it's just faster to record a quick voice note to yourself.

There's more information and links to the App Store on the OmniFocus for iPhone page.  Also, our very own Michaela has put together a great intro video for OmniFocus for iPhone. If you're curious about the application and would like to see more before purchasing, check it out now. It's a 26MB 15MB download so you might want to option-click that link to start it downloading rather than wait for the page to load it in fully.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Explanations up front: As difficult as it may be to imagine, some of here at the Omni Group are avid gamers, and one of those games we play happens to be Dungeons & Dragons. As it so happens, Wizards of the Coast have come out with a new version of D&D, the 4th edition since its launch many years ago, and there are some new aspects that wound up dovetailing quite nicely into OmniFocus and its handling of repeating tasks and projects.

Now, one of the things about playing this particular game is that there can be an awful lot of information to remember, and at times it’s darn near impossible to remember it all, so one is perpetually diving into the Player’s Handbook to find information, and if you’re at all familiar with the Player’s Handbook, then you know as well as I do that finding information in that tome can be difficult at best. To be fair, the new edition has much nicer charts, tables, and graphs, but so far as important wordage goes, things tend to be scattered throughout the book.

We have been using OmniGraffle in the past to create and maintain character sheets, and I myself have endeavored to get as much information as possible onto the character sheet, to avoid the long searching in the PHB. With this new version, I immediately started thinking about using the notes feature in OmniGraffle Professional for this, referencing a document on my laptop to makes things quite a bit easier.

Then I got to thinking about the new feature in the 4th edition, the idea of powers that can be used at will, or once during an encounter, or once daily, that sort of thing. Wizards is apparently selling decks of cards with these powers on them, when in play you turn them over so you know that you’ve used that particular encounter or daily power. Aha! I thought to myself, I can make them in OmniGraffle, and put some actions on them so that when I poke said power “card”, they dim out or some such thing.

All of this of course, requires me bringing my laptop to the gaming session. If only there was some smaller device, that was on my person pretty much at all times, that I could use instead…

Enter OmniFocus into the brainstorm.

While it may seem to be a very odd pairing, a game and a GTD application, it turns out that the basic document interface to OmniFocus is very useful in listing attributes and abilities, with full descriptive text explanations in the notes. And, making repeating projects and tasks for the aforementioned encounter and daily powers winds up being a very effective method for tracking what’s been used, both during the actual gaming session as well as looking back over a long period of time to see how you made the most use of what ability and what-not.

After bouncing this idea off of some co-workers that also play, here’s what I wound up with:

My ‘character’ in OmniFocus is a folder of various projects (all parallel, although I suspect it doesn’t matter) to break down into the various aspects of the character. For instance, “Character Information” is a project and such things as name and race and class are just tasks within that project. “Race Features” is a separate project, with whatever bonuses I get for being a dwarf listed as tasks, with full descriptions from the Player’s Handbook entered in as the note for the task. This way, pretty much anything I need to immediately know about my character when playing is right there, in context.

At this point, I could easily be using OmniGraffle or OmniOutliner or even TextEdit or the Notes application on the iPhone to display this information in a more effective way than bookmarking my PHB or committing to memory. However, it quickly became evident that repeating projects and tasks would be ‘the win’ when set up as my combat powers.

In the 4th Edition, your character gets a certain set of powers to use in combat or while adventuring. Some of these are considered to be “at will”, in that you can use them at any time and as often as desired. Some other powers you may only use once during an encounter with a monster, and some you may only do once per day.

As a result, I have a project for my At-Will Powers, and a project for my Encounter Powers, and a project for my Daily Powers. My At-Will project is not repeating, however the tasks in it that represent these things that my character can do are set to repeating. My Encounter and Daily projects are set to repeat, but the tasks within are not.

So, in the course of gaming if I use my at-will “Cleave” power, I mark that task as completed, and get another one in its place in case I need to use it next round. If I use say, “Spinning Sweep”, which is an Encounter Power, then I mark the task I have representing it as complete, and cannot use it again. At the end of the encounter I go ahead and mark the project I have for my Encounter Powers as complete, and since it’s a repeating project, I get a brand new version of it for the next baddie that might come my way.

Rinse and repeat, and after six months or perhaps a year I can also go back and look at my completed items and see what I’ve been using the most, that sort of thing.

Best yet, as I alluded to somewhere way further up in this post, is that it works really wonderfully on the iPhone, the syncing between the desktop version of OmniFocus and the iPhone/iPod Touch version means that I have a very rich and informative document about my roleplaying character, which in turn winds up being fairly interactive, all in my pocket.

We all thought it would make for a good blog post, hope you enjoyed reading it.

(OmniFocus for iPhone approaches the podium, holding back tears as the stage lights momentarily flare in brilliance. The crowd! The crowd!)“I'm just so flattered. Thank you. I don't know what to say! I'd like to thank the academy, my parents, their parents, Sir Laurence Olivier and Little Debbie snack cakes.”

Apple Design Awards 2008

That's right… it appears that OmniFocus for the iPhone is both cutting-edge and well dressed. We're super proud of this and can't wait to get it out there so that folks can start using it. Let's have a big round of applause for the team working on the iPhone app. They've been working serious amounts of crazy to get this ready and I am constantly picking my jaw up off the floor when they still, somehow, manage to find time to sneak in some really cool new feature.

For those of you that haven't seen the OmniFocus for iPhone preview page, take a look now. More coming soon.

Well! After an invigorating morning yesterday watching the live WWDC coverage I think we're all thinking the same thing: a script typeface, Apple? Really?

Oh, and apparently there's been some iPhone announcements, something about 3D? I have to admit I got distracted by the awesome metal box. What's in the box? What's in the boooooooox?

(HER PRETTY HEAD!)

Anyway, we have our own bit of news, now that the Great App Store Reveal has officially taken place. As we mentioned back in March, we've been working on OmniFocus for the iPhone—a native, location-aware app with live, automatic sync and custom actions based on your whereabouts.

Behold: IT LIVES.

We're still making some refinements, but OmniFocus for iPhone should be available on the App Store on or around launch time. Just one more reason to be counting down the days until July, people.

PS. Don't forget, there's an OmniFocus meetup tonight in S.F. at 6:30 PM. Come by and say hello if you're in the area!

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