Blog
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OmniFocus, OmniGraffle, and Snow Leopard updates—oh my
Posted by Linda Sharps on 08.27.09 | Comment
Lots of news today, people, so I'm going to try and keep this short so you can skip straight ahead to the part where you sit back and bask in that new-software smell.
Updated: OmniFocus! OmniFocus 1.7 is now available for your downloading pleasure, and includes a bevy of interface improvements designed to make everything just a little more smooth and simple. We also re-worked Perspectives, hopefully making the process of working with them much easier. Overall sync performance has been improved (yay!), and you can now view a list of the attachments in your OmniFocus document, and delete them as necessary to speed up document syncing even more.
Also updated: OmniGraffle! OmniGraffle 5.2 includes support for support for portables with Multi-Touch trackpads, so you can now pinch to zoom in or out, resize a selection, or rotate a selection. We also added fixes to tables, shared layers, and dealt with some stability issues.
Also also updated: EVERYTHING ELSE. OmniFocus, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, OmniWeb, OmniPlan—hold on, typing cramp . . . okay—OmniGraphSketcher, OmniDiskSweeper and OmniDazzle have all been updated with support for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
You do not EVEN want to know what time the engineers went to bed last night, is what I'm saying.
Everything can be downloaded from our handy-dandy Snow Leopard status page. Enjoy!
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OmniWeb, OmniDazzle, OmniDiskSweeper, and OmniObjectMeter now freeware
Posted by Linda Sharps on 02.24.09 | 72 Comments
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.
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OmniDazzle 1.0.2 now available!
Posted by Troy on 11.14.07 | Comment
Critical bug-fixing for leopard compatibility has been completed. You can grab the final version of 1.0.2 and read the release notes here.
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OmniDazzle 1.0.1 Now Available.
Posted by Troy on 11.01.06 | Comment
No Changes were made between beta 2 and this final release but changes since 1.0 include:
Stability
- On the Mac Pro, if the video card is a NVIDIA 7300 and there is more than 2GB of memory, Pixie Dust is disabled. This avoids a bug in Mac OS X where the entire machine will crash. We will enable this again when Apple fixes this problem.
- Fixed a crash in OmniDazzle when using Focal Point on Photoshop.
Localizations
- Made several interface strings localizable
- Added a French localization
General
- Added workaround for bug in the Accessibility support in Mac OS X that would cause crashes when Focal Point queried menus or popups in other applications in some cases.
- Help pages now have individual titles for improved searching.
- Pressing the escape key with the Zoom plug-in with the selection indicator still active now also marks the screen 'clear' so you no longer have to manually do this to use the plug-in again.
- Added correction to the software update query to avoid reporting incorrect data.
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OmniDazzle 1.0.1 beta 2 now available.
Posted by Troy on 10.25.06 | Comment
Changes in beta 2:
Stability
- On the Mac Pro, if the video card is a NVIDIA 7300 and there is more than 2GB of memory, Pixie Dust is disabled. This avoids a bug in Mac OS X where the entire machine will crash. We will enable this again when Apple fixes this problem.
- Fixed a crash in OmniDazzle when using Focal Point on Photoshop
Localizations
- Made several interface strings localizable
- Added a French localization
You can download here
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A bunch of betas
Posted by Ken Case on 08.24.06 | Comment
Yesterday we released a new beta of OmniDazzle 1.0.1, and today we released new betas of OmniPlan 1.0, OmniOutliner 3.6.1, and OmniWeb 5.5. So if you're a user of any of these products, you might want to check out the latest versions! There are links to all of these at www.omnigroup.com, or you can go directly to the beta of your choice using one of these links:
Enjoy!
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OmniDazzle 1.0.1 Beta 1 is available
Posted by James on 08.23.06 | Comment
This is a small maintenance release to address some stability and usability issues found in OmniDazzle 1.0. A new feature release is still in planning.
- Added workaround for bug in the Accessibility support in Mac OS X that would cause crashes when Focal Point queried menus or popups in other applications in some cases.
- Help pages now have individual titles for improved searching.
- Pressing the escape key with the Zoom plug-in with the selection indicator still active now also marks the screen 'clear' so you no longer have to manually do this to use the plug-in again.
- Added correction to the software update query to avoid reporting incorrect data.
Download OmniDazzle 1.0.1 Beta 1
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OmniDazzle goes finazzle
Posted by Linda Sharps on 06.16.06 | Comment
Hey, did you know that OmniDazzle is based on the unique capabilities provided by Apple's Core Image framework and showcases the power of the OpenGL based windowing system in Mac OS X?
(I have no idea what those words mean. I just copied an engineer's email. Ha! Am v. smart and technical-sounding now.)
The final release is up now: OmniDazzle One-Point-Ohhh Yeah. From beta to final release in 14 days – boy, I'm pretty sure this is a first for us at The Omni Group. I know every single caffeinated beverage has been plundered from the snack room and there's more than one person walking around in that I-haven't-slept-in-days fog (look, I'm not pointing fingers, but guys? The tag on your shirt goes on the inside), so believe me when I say it hasn't been easy.
If you're just joining us, welcome! Pardon the cat hair. OmniDazzle is a set of fun and useful enhancements that help you highlight certain areas of your screen, create special effects, and track the location of your mouse pointer. It is most certainly not just a cursor locator, as has been explained to me repeatedly and maybe with some spirited hand gestures.
OmniDazzle helps you incorporate graphical cues as a presentation tool, capture great screenshots, point out information on your desktop, and make your computer an object of envy by producing impressive onscreen effects.
Or, as some people here are referring to OmniDazzle, it's utilitainment.
(Can I just, uh, make it clear that your trusty Marketing Weasel is NOT one of those people? Okay then.)
We've received some positive feedback from some of you on the Focal Point plug-in, which functions by bordering the active UI element on the screen and dimming the background. As Bill mentioned here a couple posts back, it's great for staying focused on a particular task when you're working by yourself – or, if you're doing a presentation, directing attention to specific elements. People also like the Zoom plug-in, which works nicely for magnifying interesting sections of your screen (like for instance this fantastic squirrel's sweater).
You should also check out the Scribble plug-in, especially if you do slideshow presentations. Being able to draw all over your screen is handy, you can circle things and draw arrows and write notes and so on. I particularly recommend doodling a little robot on top of your Keynote slide while you're talking about something that has nothing at all to do with robots.
Seriously, it's awesome. Try it. Give your robot some fancy eyelashes and maybe a pair of roller skates if you really want to freak everyone out. Then deny, deny, deny! (“What robot? I'm not sure what you mean, Bob, and frankly I think we're getting off track here.”)
If by some bizarre chance you don't find the plug-ins themselves to be fun or useful, just looking at the app while it's active is pretty cool in my opinion. You've got the smoooooth animations, anti-aliased rendering awesomeness, and slick reflections in the plug-in previews. It's eye candy, but not the empty calorie kind, the sports–energy kind with an inexplicable protein source!
Jeez. I mean, it's utilitainment. And it's available for a very reasonable $14.95.
Please note that while we're working to resolve any remaining hardware incompatibility issues, you'll need a fairly modern video card to run OmniDazzle. Check here for more information on that.
Okay, this post has definitely exceeded the Unwritten Yet Generally Agreed-Upon Blog Word Count Limit, so…the end! Go play with OmniDazzle now! And thank you, as always, for coming by.
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Committed
Posted by Tim Wood on 06.09.06 | Comment
Since I just committed my last OmniDazzle fix (at least until QA tracks me down…), I thought I'd share a fun graph.
Omni has been using source control systems like CVS and Subversion since forever. A while back, we converted to Subversion and imported most of our CVS repository (none of our old consulting projects, just our apps). Here is a graph of the number of commits in our repository over the last 13 years.
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Hey Internets
Posted by Bill Van Hecke on 06.08.06 | Comment
Some people have expressed… concern over OmniDazzle's price, saying that $14.95 is too much to ask for a cursor locator. Well, I want them to know…
Here you see the Scribble plug-in at work. I use Cutout to highlight stuff for screenshots, Zoom to check fine details on interface elements, and Focal Point to avoid distractions while I'm writing in OmniOutliner.
In fact, I think Focal Point is my favorite part of OmniDazzle. Here's how I have it set up while I'm working in OmniOutliner:
No border, and a low-transparency dark background color. This way I don't see 16 applications across 30 inches of Cinema Display, shining in my face, while I'm trying to concentrate on writing.
Of course, if you've lost your cursor, there are free ways to find it. There are also free web browsers, free outliners, and free graphics applications. But price isn't the only variable involved; we believe in the idea, yeah, we thrive on the idea that it's worth paying money for something really, really cool.
