The Omni Group

Hello again OmniPlan planners!

Just a quick post to let everybody know that a new update for OmniPlan v2.0 beta has been released! We fixed 17 of the most commonly reported crashers from the first beta and addressed some issues with exports and collaboration that beta testers found over the last couple of weeks. If you'd like to check out the full release notes, click here and scroll down to the bottom of the page.

As always, please keep in mind that this version is still in development so feedback is encouraged and we apologize if it breaks your computer, corrupts your files, or ruins your weekend. We're looking forward to hearing your thoughts about OmniPlan v2.0: You can contact us directly by our support page or by using the Send Feedback feature in your copy of OmniPlan.

To start using the new beta, you can use the built-in software updater in OmniPlan v2.0 or you can download it from our website here.

I'm very pleased to announce that OmniOutliner for iPad is now available on the App Store for $19.99!

We've posted screenshots and a video tutorial on our OmniOutliner for iPad pages, and here's the official press release:

We hope you enjoy our latest app!

When I announced last week that OmniOutliner for iPad had been submitted to the App Store, I noted that we were still busy putting together our marketing materials which explain what the app does in more detail.  Well, we just finalized our App Store description and screenshots, so I'd like to share those with you now:

OmniOutliner starts as a blank page. But as you collect, compose, and rearrange text, its powerful outlining features emerge to organize your ideas. Hierarchy, columns, styling, notes — use them all in concert or keep things simple, depending on the project at hand. From basic lists and tables to serious writing and data wrangling, OmniOutliner understands how to keep your work structured and tidy.

Why choose OmniOutliner for iPad?

COMFORT: OmniOutliner was designed with speed and ease in mind, especially for data entry. Carefully-planned keyboard interactions and the ever-present Edit bar make it straightforward to add and rearrange items. Your ideas are what’s important — OmniOutliner just helps you get them in order.

STRUCTURE: Expand and collapse groups to concentrate on what’s important now. Use the flyout Plus buttons to put new items right where you need them. And of course, just drag items around when you need to rearrange the order. If you need to make a bigger change, use Edit mode to move or modify a bunch of rows at once.

COLUMNS: Checkboxes, formatted numbers, pop-up lists, dates… Keep track of any number of different fields in each row. If you have too many columns to see at once, you can hide some. Or just temporarily slide them underneath the main outline column to get at the ones you’re interested in. You can even sort your rows by any column, then restore their original order.

STYLES: Thanks to the included sample documents and styles, you may never need to adjust anything yourself. But if you want to, check out our custom rich-text editor, with more detailed styling than you’re likely to find anywhere else on iPad. Save your favorites as named styles, for quick and consistent styling across your document. Even chain styles together to automatically change rows based on their position in the hierarchy.

NOTES: Inline notes make it easy to keep track of ideas for future revisions, ancillary content, reviewers’ comments, ill-considered notions, snide jokes, and other miscellaneous info. You can attach notes to any row in a document, and show or hide them individually or en masse. And of course, notes can be styled just as precisely as the main content.

LINKS & ATTACHMENTS: Web addresses you type automatically get linkified. And any image you can copy and paste, from tiny embellishments to sketches from a drawing app to full-sized photos, can be placed right in your outline.

SHARING: OmniOutliner has no shortage of ways to share your documents. Import and export via iDisk, WebDAV, or email, in several formats: OmniOutliner (compatible with OmniOutliner 3 for Mac), OPML (compatible with other outlining applications), HTML, or good old-fashioned plain text. You can even choose a dynamic HTML export with expandable and collapsible groups.

SUPPORT: If you have any feedback or questions, we'd love to hear from you! The Omni Group offers free tech support: you can reach us by email at omnioutliner@omnigroup.com, by phone at 1-800-315-6664 or +1-206-523-4152, or on twitter at @omnioutliner.

Thank you!

And now, the screenshots!

Sadly, the App Store only allows for five screenshots. Fortunately, our blog has no such limitation, so here are a few more!

Again, we don't know exactly how long it will take for OmniOutliner to be reviewed, but hopefully it won't take too much longer. Once it has been approved, we'll post a specific launch date and time—so if you haven't seen anything here yet, there's no need to keep checking the App Store. In fact, if you'd like to be notified by email the moment OmniOutliner is available on the App Store, you can subscribe to our low-traffic OmniNews mailing list or to our OmniOutliner Users mailing list. Or you can follow @omnigroup or @omnioutliner on twitter.

As always, I'd welcome any feedback you might have: leave a comment here, or send me a message on twitter (where you'll find me at @kcase). Thanks for taking the time to read this!

When the iPad was announced last year, I posted that we were planning to bring all five of our productivity apps to iPad. We've just submitted OmniOutliner for iPad to the App Store, the fourth of those five apps:

I've been looking forward to OmniOutliner for iPad all year: OmniOutliner is the app I turn to whenever I want to collect and structure my thoughts (it's where I'm writing this text right now!) and it's great to be able to take those outlines with me and work with them on my iPad.

Now that OmniOutliner for iPad has reached GM, we're busy putting together some screenshots and an intro video which explain how the app fits together, and we look forward to posting those to our main website as well as more information here. For now, though, let me share this teaser video:

We don't know exactly how long it will take for OmniOutliner to be reviewed, but hopefully not more than a week or two. If you'd like to be notified by email the moment OmniOutliner is available on the App Store, you can subscribe to our low-traffic OmniNews mailing list or to our OmniOutliner Users mailing list. And, of course, you can watch this space—or follow @omnigroup or @omnioutliner (or me, @kcase) on twitter.

Meanwhile, let me briefly give some updates on our other projects! But first, an important reminder: our plans do change over time, so please don't rely on things happening according to today's particular snapshot of those plans.

• OmniPlan v2 just went into beta, adding multi-user collaboration over the air (through Apple's MobileMe or our own Omni Sync Server, or your own private WebDAV server). For more about that, see last week's blog post. Once we wrap up this beta, we'll finally be ready to start on the last of our “iPad or Bust!” projects, OmniPlan for iPad.
• Our free Omni Sync Server has been in beta since last summer, and it's been working quite well: over 18,000 people have signed up and feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. This will remain a free service for all Omni customers when it leaves beta; if you haven't tried it already, I encourage you to give it a spin!
• OmniGraphSketcher for Mac has a major update now in beta which adds support for log scales—important when you're trying to compare trends in data which might be orders of magnitude apart. We're also working on bringing that work over to the iPad app.
• We're very close to submitting an update to OmniFocus for iPhone, adding the very popular Forecast view which was introduced in the iPad app. (Here's a screenshot.) Our test pilots found a few bugs around the edges that we need to squash before it's ready to ship, though, so it'll probably be another week or two before it's submitted (and another week after that before it's reviewed).
• For OmniOutliner 4 for Mac we've taken apart our entire outline architecture, rebuilding it on top of more modern OS X infrastructure such as CoreAnimation and bindings. The rebuilt outline architecture from OmniOutliner 4 reached a major milestone last week with our public beta release of OmniPlan 2—and now that OmniOutliner for iPad has been submitted, we can focus more of our direct attention on OmniOutliner 4.
• We're planning some major updates to OmniFocus for Mac, polishing up its user experience to match the ease of use and aesthetics of the iPad edition, adding the Forecast and Review modes which we introduced in the iPad app, and adding support for syncing projects with OmniPlan.
• And finally, we're looking forward to updating our apps to take advantage of the new features Apple is introducing in Mac OS X Lion, such as the Versions autosave architecture, built-in Resume, and full-screen apps.

As always, I'd welcome any feedback you might have: leave a comment here or send me a message on twitter (where you'll find me at @kcase).

UPDATE: I just realized that I forgot to mention the price! OmniOutliner for iPad will be $19.99.

Weren't able to make Macworld this year? Came to the show, but weren't able to check out that one presentations you were totally into? The hour of your rejoicing is at hand! We're uploading the videos to our Vimeo page as we speak. Several of the videos are up now; the rest should be up in the next day or so. (Once we upload them, Vimeo's data-crunchers have to "process" them. We don't know exactly what that entails, but we assume the result is something smooth and creamy. In our experience, smooth and creamy is good.) We know folks are really looking forward to these, so we figured we'd give folks a heads-up now, rather than wait.

We want to give a special shout-out to Merlin Mann and David Sparks, who were both kind enough to prepare and give presentations, despite, you know, not actually working here. Service above and beyond the call of duty, gentlemen; thanks very much!

Touching on something from the last blog post: this is the first time we've done screencasts "live" like this, and it turns out that the Macworld show floor is a pretty challenging place to capture audio. Our video camera was completely overwhelmed, so we ended up recording the audio separately, then synching it up and filtering as much of the background noise out as possible. Needless to say, we learned a lot that'll help for next years' videos. 

In any case, enjoy the videos and we'll see everyone next year!

It's that time of year again: the Golden Gate bridge is hitting snooze and the warm glow of Moscone's florescent lights are calling to us, like moths to an energy efficient bulb.

That's right, gang—Omni's going to Macworld.

If you, like us, are headed to San Francisco later this week, please feel free to stop by! Ask questions, pick up a little swag, take our apps for a test drive (iPad too!), or check out one our many presentations from David Sparks, Merlin Mann, and members of the Omni Staff. (You can find the schedule here.)

We're really excited to put in some face time with you guys and show off what we've been up to here in the Pacific Northwest. We're going to be sending real, live Omni-ites Omni-ans Omni-ers Omni-vores Omni folk to chat with real, live Omni users like yourself (and those who might be curious, of course).  If you've ever sent us support email or a love letter, you might put a name with a face! While these ladies and gents are on the show floor, please keep in mind that they won't be able to answer email so support response time might be a bit longer than usual.

We're looking forward to going and hope to see you there!

I'm very pleased to announce that all of our paid apps are now available through Apple's new Mac App Store! The Mac App Store is the most convenient way to buy our software, letting you purchase, download, and install our apps with just one step, and easily update our apps at the same time as you update other apps you've purchased from the the store.

But to be clear, the Mac App Store is not the only way to buy our software:  we'll continue to offer direct sales and updates through our own website as well.  Through our website, we can offer much more flexible terms and options: trial and beta downloads, upgrade pricing, and discounts for volume, bundle, and educational purchases.

No matter which way you buy our software, you'll be getting the same product:  all of our Mac App Store apps are exactly the same as the apps we sell through our website (except for a few minor changes made to work with the store).  We'll also keep future updates to our apps in sync—apps you've purchased directly through us will continue to update themselves as they always have, while App Store updates will appear on the App Store (after a slight delay due to the App Store's review process).  And either way, you'll have the same great support from our team here at Omni.

—

A few quick questions that I know a few people are wondering about (because I've already been asked!):

"Why doesn't the App Store recognize that I've already purchased an Omni app?"

The Mac App Store only supports software which you've purchased directly from it.  That's even true of Apple's software, as I found out this morning while testing Keynote.  And unfortunately, there's no way for us to tell the Mac App Store that someone has already purchased one of our apps.  (Though really, that wouldn't be fair to Apple since they wouldn't get their 30% of the purchase price to help support the store's infrastructure.)

There's been a bit of confusion over this point, since the App Store does notice when the exact same version of the exact same app is already installed:  it displays "Installed" instead of a price tag.  But that doesn't mean it will update that software: as soon as the version number changes (on either side), it reverts to showing you a price tag for that app instead.

"If I'm purchasing from the Australian Mac App Store, why are your prices so much higher than they are through your own website?"

On our website, we sell all our products in our local currency—and since we live in Seattle, that currency happens to be US dollars.

For the Mac App Store, we don't set prices directly; we choose a price tier which Apple uses to choose a price for each region.  We've chosen the price tier which is closest to our own online store pricing (just a few cents different in our local currency), but exchange rates fluctuate and this week you might happen to get a better deal buying directly from us than you do when purchasing locally.  Please feel free to take advantage of that if you wish!

"Where do I find your apps on the Mac App Store?"

We've added links on each of our product pages, or you can go straight to the Mac App Store's page for the Omni Group.

"Does your 30-day money-back guarantee apply to Mac App Store purchases?"

Absolutely! But please remember that the 30-day guarantee is not intended to take the place of a trial period: we pay 30% of our App Store sales to Apple whether or not we refund a purchase. If you'd like to try one of our Mac apps, we have two-week trial downloads available on each of our product pages. (If you need more time than two weeks, please contact sales@omnigroup.com for an extended trial license.)

—

As always, if you have a question I didn't answer (or any other feedback you'd like to share), please let me know! Either leave a comment here, or send me a message on twitter (where you'll find me at @kcase).

It's been another crazy busy month here at Omni! In the last four weeks, we've celebrated Thanksgiving and somehow survived Seattle's snow, we've started private beta testing of OmniPlan 2 and shipped updates to OmniFocus and OmniWeb for Mac. Oh, and that's not counting the 13 app releases we've submitted to the App Store this month: 2 iPhone updates, 4 iPad updates, and 7 "new" Mac apps (OmniFocus, OmniGraffle Standard and Pro, OmniOutliner Standard and Pro, OmniGraphSketcher, and OmniOutliner).

"OK," I hear some of you asking, "15 app releases this month? That's great and all, but really I only care about one release: where is OmniOutliner for iPad?"

Well, given that we're at the end of November and we have yet to reach beta, I think I can predict with confidence that OmniOutliner for iPad won't be shipping this year. We did finally come up with a design that makes us all reasonably happy on paper, but we're still busy implementing that design in code—after which we'll be running it through its paces to make sure it works as well on an actual device as it does in our imaginations.

(Not that our engineering team has been idle while all this design work has been going on. They've been busy working on all the nuts and bolts which make up the unique functionality offered in OmniOutliner!)

For those who prefer pictures, here's an updated graphic:

"You're really going to sell your apps through the Mac App Store?" I hear others asking. "What about all those questions and challenges you mentioned in your last blog post? How will you handle upgrade pricing and volume discounts, for example?"

We've decided the best way to solve those problems is to recognize that the Mac App Store isn't an exclusive distribution channel, so it doesn't need to solve every problem. We will continue to sell our apps through our own website (in addition to the App Store), where we can continue to offer discounts for upgrades, bundles, and volume purchases. We still think the Mac App Store will be the most convenient way to purchase apps for the average consumer, but those who prefer more flexible terms and options will be able to continue to purchase and install apps directly from us.

"Hey, wait, those weren't my questions at all!"

Hmm, um, OK, sorry, my magic 8-ball palantír must be broken! If you have a question I didn't answer (or any other feedback you'd like to share), please let me know! Either leave a comment here, or send me a message on twitter (where you'll find me at @kcase).

OmniPlan 1.7 Final has been released!

As always, we'd like to thank everyone who provided bug reports during the Sneaky Peeks. For OmniPlan 1.7, we focused on integrating the latest version of mpxj from mpxj.sourceforge.net. Most notably this adds support for Microsoft Project 2010 MPP files, and improves compatibility with 2007 MSPDI and earlier formats.

OmniPlan 1.7 is a free update to all registered users of OmniPlan, so fire up your built-in software updater or head to our website and download OmniPlan 1.7 today!

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