The Omni Group

Those of you heading to the Macworld Expo this week, I hope you have time to swing by our booth (#612 in the South Hall) and say hello. We'll have presentations going all week long, so plan to come by and have a seat to learn a bit more about our apps—or hey, just rest your aching feet for a while.

We'll be the ones in fancy black OmniFocus t-shirts, assuming the newest Seattle snowfall doesn't keep us from leaving town. See you there!

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.

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 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.

So, Omni's been here for a while, and in that time, we've accumulated a bunch of… stuff. For your edification and delight on this All Hallows' Eve, I quote you this 100% real email which was circulated today.

(Edit: said email was circulated by Molly, our operations manager. She threatened to slap me with a plagiarism suit and/or a licensing fee unless I gave her a byline.)

Items that were moved to the garage today and are ready to be either claimed or recycled include: 

• True Lies poster
• Mad Dog & Glory poster
• Episode 1 poster (framed)
• Disco Light
• Assorted Super Soakers/Nerf Guns
• Plastic Millennium Falcon
• Assorted Halloween decorations
• Assorted Halloween hats ... or everyday hats if that's how you roll
• Easel pads
• Red glass Xmas tree balls
• black leather ottoman
• sundry toys
• pots n pans
• fish tank
• broken vacuum
• broken steam cleaner
• green iMac ... strangely this particular iMac also has a case?
• Fixin's for a fountain
• Robotics set
• Xmas tree stand
• lightbulbs
• car cleaning supplies
• box 'o bar clamps, hammers, and other sundry tools

So there you have it. A little slice of OmniLife, as in the slice that's full of the stuff that we stick in an attic for ten years, cover with dust and the detritus that comes with repairing the roof without moving said items (getting roof-crud all over them), and finally just giving it all to a nice company that promises to recycle as much of this stuff as can possibly be recycled.

Fear our packratting, for it is legend.

Fairly often here at ye olde Omni Group we get breakfast for lunch, and when it occurs there is much rejoicing. I myself am a simple man, eggs and sausage (or bacon: sweet, lovely, bacon) and some form of breakfast potatoes are all I require. Pancakes (or flapjacks or hotcakes) are a special treat for me, and I love them dearly.

So, last week we were fortunate enough to have french toast (a rare delicacy here due to the nature of preparing them) and we all got on with our favorite breakfast foods.

Tom and Brian proved to be big fans of aebleskivers.  (Brian claims that they are both a breakfast food and a home defense technology)

Michaela thinks that poffertjes are the best ever, offered in hot-dog style carts in Amsterdam.

Liz in turn started craving maandazi (apparently hailing from Africa, Wikipedia has let me down here).

Much discussion of breakfast potatoes transpired (I like me some home fries, Rowan prefers the Potatoes Deluxe from the Streamliner Diner on Bainbridge Island (where he used to work).

Bill wanted more pancakes, going so far as to recommend pankeggs which some thought involved beer of some kind, Brian pointed out that McMeniman's stout is used in a recipe at the Kennedy School in Portland.

So, what's your preference for breakfast goodness? Let us know and we can try to convince Terry to serve it up some time.

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!

Our intrepid James has been toiling behind the scenes for many weeks now to convert Omni's website into something a little less baroque, content-management-wise. I don't know all the technical details, but he seems to have streamlined a giant pasta-dish of code into a far more accessible system that can actually be updated without doing the web version of Twister. Plus, we have finally gotten rid of the dreaded FRAMES that earned us one of the more entertaining flame mails I've ever read (it involved many, many exclamation points).

Please take a look around when you get a chance, we're hoping you let us know if you encounter any glitches.

Here's the question I've been asking myself this week: am I too old to understand the appeal of Twitter, or not cool enough?

I'm not sure I like the answer either way.

Anyway, since I don't have any exciting product news at the moment, I thought I'd ask you folks to share some entertaining website distractions. Because it's, um, Omni Mouth Link Day! Oh, you didn't know about Omni Mouth Link Day? It's like Thursday, only with more links.

I'll go first:

• The ColorJack Sphere; handy for all kinds of design projects

• Giant microbes! Aw, who's a little Borrelia burgdorferi?

• Fantastic video of someone's entire wedding party doing the Thriller dance

• Kent Rogowski's Bears: gosh, it looks like the perfect baby shower gift (“Hm, he doesn't normally cry like that . . .”)

Okay, blog readers—your turn. Spill your latest web finds, in the name of Omni Mouth Link Day!

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