We're looking for a couple of good ninjas; support ninjas, specifically.
The jobs section of our website warns that “we have two warm-blooded animals (plus a lot of fish) in the building”, which confuses me greatly. Apparently all this time I've been working with iguanas, or possibly skinks. Also, we have one office cat, but maybe we also have a guinea pig, or something? WHY HAS NO ONE TOLD ME OF THE GUINEA PIG.
Anyway. We're hiring! You must be able to tolerate iguanas, fish, cats, guinea pigs, and probably wallabies in order to work here. Here's all the relevant info.
(Update: I've been informed that birds are warm-blooded. Hmmmm, so that's what all the squawking from upstairs is…I thought it was an ongoing WoW game that occasionally got out of hand.)
Let me tell you, it's not always easy being a non-technical person in an office of engineers. It's like bumbling your way through a foreign country where everyone knows the native tongue except you.
Engineer: “You'll need to use an ssh tunnel to access that.”
Me: “Okay. So are we talking an actual, physical tunnel here, or…?”
Engineer: “....”
I'm a n00b, what can I say. I'm intimidated by the Terminal (gah, the name alone: terminal!), acronyms befuddle me (TCP? VPN? what?), and AppleScript may as well be that African click language for all of my (in)ability to grasp its vernacular.
On the plus side, I like to think I can provide the lowest-denominator usability cases for our software. Sure, most of our applications can do complex operations and have all kinds of advanced settings, but hey–*I* can use them. Me, the mouthbreather who once clicked an emailed document screenshot…not once, not twice, but three times in a row, each time cursing the software's inability to perform.
The point of this post is actually not to convince you of the amount of oxygen whistling merrily through my skull, but to share some everyday, real life uses of our software in the hopes you'll do the same.
I use OmniOutliner to keep a running tally of household items I need to buy (on my list right now: “Spot Magic” carpet cleaner. Stupid cat), to draft writing projects, to keep track of who got what over the holidays (thus reducing the chance of gifting Relative So-and-So with yet another singing bass fish) (not that I would ever purchase such a corny novelty item), to plan vacation-related to-do items, and to store random bits of research I want to follow up on later.
I use OmniWeb's Workspaces feature to rattle through the giant list of blogs I visit daily; Shortcuts to quickly jump to IMDB, All Recipes, and Weather.com; and site-specific preferences to de-lamify sites with great content but obnoxious presentation.
Now with OmniGraffle, I don't typically spend a lot of time making complicated charts with all kinds of links and Bezier-drawn shapes and tables and whatnot (although I would be remiss in my Marketing Weasel duty if I did not point out that Graffle can obviously do all of those things), but I did make some downright spiffy holiday cards with OmniGraffle, and I'm currently using it to lay out a tile design for a bathroom remodel. And I made a process document for dealing with my eight-month-old son if he wakes up at night. Oh, you think I'm kidding?
Okay, quid pro quo time. If you're inclined, we'd love to see how you're using our apps in your day to day life, be they geeky tech examples that I'll have to have someone explain to me in monosyllabic terms, or otherwise. Hit the Say It! (Don't Spray It!) button and let us know.
On the eve of Earth Day, I thought I'd mention that The Omni Group is powered with 100% renewable energy, thanks to Seattle City Light's “Green Up” program. If you're not fortunate enough to live in a city which provides its customers with the option to purchase green power, you can still buy Green Tags to replace whatever amount of power you currently consume with power generated from renewable sources.
Have you gone green yet? Tell us about it!
Advertising is always a difficult activity for a company to justify. It's not cheap, for one thing, and it's not an instantaneous return-on-investment expenditure–not too many people see one ad and break their legs rushing to a store in order to buy the promoted product.
Well, unless we're talking about the complete second season of Deadwood, because speaking personally I just can't get enough of Calamity Jane. I'd share my favorite Jane quote with you, but this is a family-friendly blog.
Anyway: advertising. We don't typically do web advertising, in part because we have this browser we develop that helps you avoid web ads, but we did decide to buy some space in a couple Mac magazines and see how that went.
We've been advertising in Macworld and MacAddict for a while now, and I thought I'd share the upcoming June artwork for those who are interested (and even those who aren't, I guess, in which case I apologize for today's ho-hum content and direct you to this fine link instead).
(This is the same ad we ran last month, but we've had a number of different ones. Maybe I'll post an Omni “ad gallery” so you can see them all.)
I can't really tell you how definitively successful (or not) the print campaign has been–there's that elusive ROI thing again–but we have heard from a few folks who may not have known about Omni otherwise. That seems good.
We chose to try advertising because we're a small software company with a limited number of resources trying to get our name out there. It doesn't seem like it would be such a challenge in a fairly finite Mac OS X world; after all, a couple of our applications are bundled on a LOT of Apple hardware these days. And yet a not-uncommon description of Omni is “the best software you've never heard of”.
So, talk to us, folks. How do you typically find out about software? Magazines, news sites, blogs, the shelf of a retail store, word of mouth–what's most useful to you?
Our resident moviemaking experts, Grayson and Terry, shot Omni's very first commercial recently. I believe the idea was originally floated as a joke, and then suddenly there was a storyboard and cameras and someone actually Riverdancing and now…
I give you:
“Yes!”
Note: no Omni employees were harmed during the filming of this video. Well, except for Brian's dignity, but he's a fast healer.
We've had a lot of requests for web forums, so hopefully there are some of you who will thrust a triumphant fist in the air over this.
Caveats include the fact that we know the forums are kind of, well, not so fresh looking right now and we'll be stylificationing them in the future.
Drop on by and say hello, why don't you.
“Redonkulous”
“Bananaphone”
“I just lost the game”
“Oh, [insert application name here]”
“OMG I'M IN UR BASE KILLING UR DOODZ”
“Hey mans”
“What?”
“zOMG”
“Boot!”
“Jamba?”
“Dr Pepper”
“mmmm….coffee”
“There's a new Strong Bad email”
Hello, and welcome to The Omni Mouth, our charmingly-named outlet for All Things Omni. Well, not all things Omni, it's not like we'll be writing about…oh, the magnets on our snackroom refrigerator, or something. Like we'd be that self-obsessed and insipid! Please.
I mean, that's what our Flickr account is for.
Anyway, the plan is to provide you lovely people with frequent (“frequent” meaning “whenever we remember to do so”) updates on what The Omni Group is up to. We won't abandon our other methods of information dissemination, so if you are a fan of the carefully crafted, nutrient-rich press release, fear not–we'll continue to send out official conch trumpetings when new software versions are available.
Check back for news, tips, pithy vignettes, and a comical overuse of exclamation points.
!!!!
