Beta 2 of OmniGraphSketcher is now available via software update or from the OmniGraphSketcher Product Page. This release features a few bug and crash fixes, as well as an updated “Getting Started” document. You can read the full release notes in the OmniGraphSketcher help menu.
We've also got a new screencast, focused on importing and working with data from another application. You can find it on the main OmniGraphSketcher page as well.
Thanks to everyone who has downloaded the beta and sent feedback so far! If you have any graphs (made with OmniGraphSketcher or that you'd like to be able to make) that you think are interesting, we'd love to see them - it really helps us figure out just what people are using the tool for. You can contact our support ninjas via Help > Send Feedback or by emailing omnigraphsketcher@omnigroup.com.
Exciting news from Omni today, friends: we've got a brand-new product for you to try out. Introducing . . . OmniGraphSketcher.
Okay, technically it's not brand new, if you're going to be a stickler about “the truth” and all. OmniGraphSketcher was created by Robin Stewart, who designed what was originally called Graph Sketcher in 2003 while he was attending Williams College, and continued working on it at MIT where it was the basis of his master's thesis. Now that Robin's employed at Omni, he was kind enough to bring Graph Sketcher along with him, and for the last six months Omni has been hard at work developing the latest version of what is now OmniGraphSketcher.
What IS this product with the name that takes forever to type, you say? I AM SO GLAD YOU ASKED. OmniGraphSketcher is a fast, simple tool that combines the data plotting power of charting applications with the ease of a basic drawing program. In short, you use it to make graphs. Precise, sharp-looking graphs, even.
OmniGraphSketcher is designed for reports, presentations, and problem sets where you need to produce accurate, presentation-worthy graphs on the fly. You can just click and draw lines, shade in areas, connect and align objects, and add labels as you go. Or, copy and paste data from a spreadsheet into OmniGraphSketcher. All adjustments are displayed in real time, so fine tuning is a breeze.
Whether you need to make economics diagrams, illustrate a science project, display marketing data, or just re-publish the well-known Cat Proximity Phenomenon, voila—OmniGraphSketcher to the rescue. Fast, simple graph drawing, without the hassle of using a complicated data visualization program. WIN.
OmniGraphSketcher is currently in beta, and licenses are available for $29.95. Educational and family pricing are available from the Omni Group's online store.
Note: if you're an existing Graph Sketcher customer, you're eligible for a free upgrade to OmniGraphSketcher, and will receive notification of your upgrade status via email.
You can follow OmniGraphSketcher on Twitter at @OmniGS.
Now, go forth and download! You can use OmniGraphSketcher in unlicensed mode for a two-week trial, with no restrictions. Enjoy!
In case you missed the news last week, OmniWeb is now free!
But that doesn't mean that we've stopped developing OmniWeb: we've been posting new sneaky peek builds of the upcoming OmniWeb 5.9.1 release nearly every day since that announcement. If you hop on over to OmniWeb's sneaky peek page and check out the latest release notes, you'll see that we've added support for three-finger swipes on recent laptops, made the tab drawer automatically close when you return to a single tab, fixed the Amazon rating system bug, reimplemented speech input and the Summarize toolbar item, and more!
We've also gotten pretty far with integrating the new Safari 4 beta engine: it's now integrated into our internal builds of OmniWeb 6, and we're bringing that work back to OmniWeb 5 so it can make it into the 5.9 sneaky peek builds.
Come visit OmniWeb's sneaky peek page and see what we've been up to!
Hey OmniPlan planners, 1.6.2 beta 1 has been released!
In this version, we fixed some memory management issues that we suspect were the cause of the -[OPGanttView drawRect:] crasher we've been pursuing. If you're still getting it, we'd love to know!
We've also updated our Japanese localization which fixes broken links in the HTML exports, fixed a rare condition that led to an infinite loop in resource leveling, and fixed a bug preventing documents from being overwritten correctly when saved to AFP filesystems.
Last but not least, we've done away with the demo mode limit of 20 tasks and now support unlimited functionality for 14 days. Thereafter the user can open and export plan files, but not edit them. We still need to do some minor tweaks to this so currently the release notes don't show up on first launch, but you can view them by going to the Help menu.
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.
As always, please let us know if you have any questions or comments. You can contact us directly via our support page or by using the Send Feedback feature in your copy of OmniPlan.
If you're ready to give this beta a try, you can download it here!
Hi, all!
In case you missed it, we shipped OmniFocus 1.5 last November, adding synchronization between any number of OmniFocus for Mac and OmniFocus for iPhone databases, archiving, view presets, style preferences, and more. You'll definitely want to make sure you're using this latest version, which you can grab from the OmniFocus page.
We're also hard at work on OmniFocus 1.6, and if you're interested in trying out the latest ongoing (possibly unstable) builds, you can access the sneaky peeks at the sneaky peek page. It adds support for projects which automatically complete when all tasks within the project are complete, makes contexts completely optional (actions without contexts are no longer considered unavailable), lets you filter your inbox and no context lists, and lets you view all your due or flagged items in a single list.
In other news, we are working closely with the The David Allen Company to promote OmniFocus as a GTD enabled software solution. What does this mean for you? Well, hopefully our working relationship will help us better support those of you who are using the GTD methodology, by having an ongoing connection with the folks at David Allen & Co. and staying in touch with their latest thinking. As we look to future versions of OmniFocus, we want to help you get the most out of your GTD-specific workflows, and provide more GTD resources that supplement our software.
(Of course, you don't have to be a GTD fan to use OmniFocus: we think we provide a very useful set of features for other task management styles, and we're continuing to make improvements there as well.)
COME SEE US AT THE GTD SUMMIT
We also wanted you to know that Omni will be at the GTD Summit in San Francisco on March 11-13. If you're interested in attending, you can access a special discount of 35% (more than $800) off the Summit fee. To register, go to the registration page and enter the coupon code “Summit35”.
You may wish to view a short invitation from David, and you can find more details about the event at www.gtdsummit.com. We hope to see you there!
Lastly, we're thrilled to announce that this past weekend we sold our 50,000th copy of OmniFocus for iPhone! Thank you so much to all the folks who have helped us immeasurably by sending in suggestions, reporting issues, and recommending OmniFocus to friends.
If you missed our announcement earlier today or this Macworld article, here's the latest from Omni HQ: OmniWeb, OmniDazzle, OmniDiskSweeper, and OmniObjectMeter are now available as freeware. That's right: they're free. You can go download them right now if you want. FOR FREE.
Go ahead, we'll wait.
In anticipation of some curiosity as to why we made this decision:
So . . . uh, why?
We've been thinking about this for a while, especially with regards to OmniWeb. Because we're a small company and we don't have unlimited engineering resources, by necessity certain projects are going to take up more of our attention. Instead of continuing to charge for these four applications, which aren't getting updated as frequently as our other titles, we felt it would better serve the community to make them available at no cost.
Wait! Does this mean you're discontinuing these products?
No. We aren't ruling out future updates at all, and we're keeping our options open. We have lots of ideas for what we'd like to add to these products, and it's possible that at some point we'll have more resources to allocate to them.
Is Omni . . . going out of business? OMG!
Absolutely not. We just had our best year ever, and we're continuing to grow. In fact, we're hiring right now! Tell your talented developer friends!
You SAY free, but I bet I have to fill out a form or send in personal information or otherwise be subjected to some sort of annoying marketing activity to get these apps, RIGHT?
Nope. Just click that fancy “download” button, and you're good to go.
If you have any actual questions that I didn't just make up, please, feel free to leave them in the comments—we'll try to address everything we can.
OmniOutliner 3.8 is now available! New features in this version are:
- Quick Look support for attachments
As can be done in OmniFocus already, you can now bring up the Quick Look preview of files you've attached or linked into OmniOutliner documents. This is very handy for file types that can't be rendered in OmniOutliner, or if you want to bring up the data in the file to easily view side-by-side with your outline. To bring up the Quick Look preview, just select the attachment and push the space bar. There's also an option in the contextual menu for attachments.
- Updated Keynote import support
You can now import Keynote files created in any currently existing versions of Keynote (that would be up to Keynote '09) and in the native .key format! However, what's actually imported has not changed much from the preview Keynote importing capabilities.
There's also been a couple more improvements to the HTML exporters and some other fixes. You can read the full release notes here.
This is a free update to all OmniOutliner 3.x licensed users. And as always, please contact our Support Ninjas if you encounter any issues or have any questions by using the Send Feedback option under the Help menu of the app.
Go and download it!
OmniOutliner 3.8 beta 2 is now available with a couple new additions! The Keynote importing support has been updated to work with all existing versions of Keynote. What is actually imported has not changed much at all but you no longer need to save to another format to import it if you were before. The HTML exporters has also been updated to support the indent children value so if you like to make your file flat even though it makes use of different row levels, you can now export and have it look the same way.
As always if you encounter any problems, please contact our Support Ninjas by using the Send Feedback option under the app's Help menu or send an email to omnioutliner@omnigroup.com. Full release notes are available here. Go download it now!
(Want to hear what we're working on next? Look for @omnifocus on twitter!)
Note: Before updating, we recommend that you either synchronize your data with MobileMe or a WebDAV server (even if you're not using OmniFocus for Mac), or that you have a current backup of your iPhone data in iTunes. (That way you won't lose any data if your update is accidentally interrupted!)
Highlights of this v1.2 release:
- The Nearby view now displays each context as soon as its distance is determined, rather than waiting to figure out the distance to each context before showing any results. It also scrolls much faster.
- Checkboxes are much easier to touch.
- When creating a new action, the keyboard appears immediately rather than sliding in after the screen.
- On the home screen, Settings have moved to the Info button in the bottom right corner.
- The Reset Database button in Settings will now reset the saved sync password in addition to the database, and will then take you back to the original welcome screen.
- Syncing automatically compacts the database on a regular basis, but when syncing is not enabled there's now a Compact Database button in Settings. (There's also some text there indicating how many tasks are stored in how many zip files, so you can tell whether your database could benefit from compacting.)
- Added underlying support for the new autocomplete settings for projects and groups which are coming in OmniFocus v1.6 for Mac.
- Actions without contexts are no longer considered unavailable.
Please continue to send suggestions or report issues to omnifocus-iphone@omnigroup.com. We appreciate your feedback!
Ta-da! OmniGraffle and OmniGraffle Professional 5.1.1 are now final, for those not keeping track of the beta releases, here are the relevant changes:
- Updated Tier 1 foreign language localizations for strings that were changed or added in the 5.1 release.
- Fixed a memory leak that could lead to a series of nasty crashes.
The beta page is gone for now, please to find the proper download at the download page.
