Blog
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Indie Interaction Design
Posted by Kris on 09.09.11 | Comment
Welcome to another installment of our Use Case Profile series, wherein we highlight OMNI APPS—IN ACTION with real working professionals.
We’re always delighted to receive email from customers who’ve experienced unbridled productivity with their favorite Omni app. Every now and then a story like this comes along and we get all giddy about sharing it. Having undoubtedly maxed-out our “this is why we do what we do” affirmations with our loved ones, we figure our blog might be a better outlet for inspiring others to unlock the potential of the Omni productivity suite.
Today’s contribution comes from Libby Donovan, a freelance designer from Los Angeles, whose enthusiasm about OmniGraffle prompted her to develop a ‘Wireframing with OmniGraffle’ class for Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts.
She writes,
I spent ten years working for Microsoft in Redmond, mainly on a PC using Visio for Information Architecture and other work that OmniGraffle would have been perfect for. In 2010, I moved back home to Los Angeles and began looking for work for both myself and my start-up design agency, Mercyluxe Design Group, and found that 90% of the open job descriptions out there required OmniGraffle skills, as it was looked at as what would soon become the industry standard within the IA community. When I began working at MySpace as an independent contractor, I was told that while I could use any program I wished to use, their preference was OmniGraffle as they had already amassed a large set of stencils that were shared amongst the IA and Design teams who were working on the redesign together. The fact that OmniGraffle had taken such a hold on the design and IA communities in LA told me that this was a program that at the very least I needed to seriously investigate.
Larry Asher, who runs The School of Visual Concepts in Seattle is an acquaintance of mine, and we were talking about OmniGraffle and I was (loudly!) singing its praises - specifically discussing how my move from Seattle to LA necessitated me to learn the program. “You just can’t get work down here with out knowing OmniGraffle, Larry, it’s the future, it’s coming!” is pretty much what I told him. Since I moved to LA I’ve been, what I call “OmniGrafflin’ my tail off” for folks like MySpace, Disney and Will >Smith (yup, THAT Will Smith!) :)
Woah! I can only imagine the focus it must have taken to produce AI and UI mockups for Mr. MIB himself. Personally, I couldn’t resist the temptation to create a Fresh Prince of Bel Air theme song flow chart, but clearly Libby can get jiggy with discipline.
While working with each client, I have found that OmniGraffle allows me the freedom to build upon each of my design principles and concepts in an almost organic way, bridging the gap between the idea and expression of that idea other programs just donʼt >allow.
For example, my desire to find a perfect balance between Swiss design principles and maximum color effectiveness would have faltered under the rigid guidelines of Visio and its inability to work alongside todayʼs top design programs. During the Will Smith project, however, OmniGraffle showed its chops by allowing for effortless compatibility with Adobeʼs Creative Suite, allowing me to fuse Visual Design, Interaction Design and Information Architecture. The finished comps were, looking back, about 80% OmniGraffle, 20% Illustrator and Photoshop. Iʼve found [OmniGraffle] allows for such quick mock-ups and edits that you can prototype rapidly – really at the speed of the design conversation.
She goes on to explain which OmniGraffle features are most helpful in her workflow:
I love the ability to draw from my giant collection of stencils, templates and icons, with the ability to add more from the community with ease. The OmniGraffle UI and feature sets also allows for very rapid prototyping, something that other programs just don’t allow for.
One of the first things I do when I start a new project (after putting on my official OmniGraffle kick off song, “Intergalactic” by Beastie Boys – true!) is a quick inventory of my stencil collection to see if I have everything I need to get started. Most of the time I don’t – I’m in need of a particular UI element like a slider, and it has to be a certain kind of slider, a UI element from a particular brand of mobile device, or even just the right radio button, I’m off to Graffletopia to comb through their huge stencil collection to see if they have what I need. Most of the time they do, thanks to the awesome community mentioned above. When they don’t, that’s when I head back to Photoshop or Illustrator to create something original that matches the style I’m using and easily import it into OmniGraffle when I’m ready. Doing it old school.
And which Stencil is her favorite?
I am very fond of the Konigi set, it’s my absolute favorite and I use it pretty much daily. I love how clean it is and how it lends itself so neatly to almost any project that can be imagined. There’s also a unicorn stencil included. What else do you need? Well, maybe the ability to use those stencils to create wireframes while you’re out ‘n’ about, right? First, that OmniGraffle for the iPad EXISTS is a big win, making the program extremely versatile and the very nature of agile. The iPad app feels very much like a natural extension of the Mac version. I like how I can use my stencils from the Mac on the iPad making adjustments to a project or coming up with quick interactions studies for example while on the go that much easier. In addition, the freehand option is also very nice for those high-tech “cocktail napkin” times. Since they both work together so well, it’s not possible to pick one over the other, especially as I use them both for very different purposes – the desktop version for my main Grafflin’ and the iPad for quick mock ups, changes on the fly and presentation with room for experimentation and augmentation right then and there.
There you have it, folks - another shining example of OMNI APPS—IN ACTION, and a refreshing testament to our raison d’être.
Thank you, Libby, for sharing your story and samples with us - inspiring stuff, indeed!
If you have a use case that you’d like to share with us, please drop a line in the comments or via email, we’d love to hear it!
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Designing Graceful, Gracious Interfaces for iPad
Posted by Kris on 04.15.11 | 8 Comments
If you'll pardon the horn-tooting for a moment, we'd like to take the opportunity to flatter one of our teammates. Omni's UX lead Bill recently spoke at the Voices That Matter conference here in Seattle. At last fall's VTM: iPhone Developers conference in Philly, Bill spoke about Designing Graceful, Gracious Interfaces for iPad alongside other notable tech folk. Though he didn't have as cool of a getup as this speaker, we think he put forth a valiant effort and are perfectly comfortable with calling him a hero from time to time.
In recognition of his contributions, not only to our apps, but to the ongoing dialogue about User Experience in software development, we would like to share some of Bill's thoughts with you. For those of you who couldn't attend the conference, here's his keynote presentation (paired with some audio from one of his practice sessions). If you find this sort of stuff as inspiring as we do, perhaps we should all arrange for a party-bus to the next conference - an omnibus, if you will.
Designing Graceful, Gracious Interfaces for iPad from The Omni Group on Vimeo.
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Mac App Store or Omni’s online store? Your choice!
Posted by Ken Case on 01.06.11 | 28 Comments
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.
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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.)
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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).
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Looking forward to the Mac App Store
Posted by Ken Case on 10.21.10 | 25 Comments
I think the Mac App Store is going to be a huge boon for Mac consumer software, and we're looking forward to publishing the same suite of Omni Group apps on the Mac App Store that we've been busy bringing to the iPad App Store: OmniFocus, OmniGraffle, OmniGraphSketcher, OmniOutliner, and OmniPlan.
The Mac App Store will be a much, much better app buying experience than any option consumers currently have: you'll be able to experiment with buying software from developers you don't know without worrying about whether they will be careful with your billing information, or whether they might even be shipping you malware. You won't have to figure out how to install the software or any of its future updates. (The standard mechanisms for distributing Mac software electronically have a poor user experience, whether they're distributed as disk images, zip files, or Installer packages.) The standards Apple will be enforcing for apps listed in the store will set a baseline for overall quality and make it less likely that apps will interfere with each other. And, of course, a central Mac App Store makes it far easier for you to find all sorts of current, supported software in the first place.
The App Store is also great from the independent developer's point of view: we don't have to figure out how to build our own online stores (or find someone else to distribute our software), or how to distribute license keys or scale up our websites and bandwidth to handle lots of downloads if we suddenly get written up by a popular reviewer. Those of us who are already established in the Mac market have already built up a lot of this infrastructure, of course, so this benefit may not be as important to us as it is to new developers. But we'll benefit from a strong, healthy, growing market for Mac apps.
And while it's new to the Mac, we know the App Store works well for consumers: we've sold tens of thousands of copies of our iOS apps in just the last few months.
Not that there aren't plenty of questions and challenges. The App Store doesn't currently have any mechanism for offering discounted pricing to certain customers, so what do we do for our OmniGraffle 5 customers who want to upgrade to OmniGraffle 6 on the App Store? Or for people who want to upgrade from Standard to Pro? (Do we even list Standard and Pro as separate apps on the store, or do we try to combine them?) How do we handle sales to organizations which want a discount for purchasing 100 licenses? How do we take care of customers who have an older system which can't run the latest version of our app, but could run an older version if we could get it to them? How do we handle trial software? Should the product pages on our website point at our own online store or the App Store—or both?
And on top of all these questions, of course, is one I've seen a lot of other developers asking: is all this worth giving Apple 30% of our revenue?
Managed hosting and payment processing are worth something, certainly, but I think the real benefit is that our software is far more likely to reach consumers who otherwise simply wouldn't see it. To date we've tried to reach consumers by placing our software in retail channels, where the split is much worse: you're lucky if you clear 50%. Not to mention that retail is completely impractical for software under $20, since there's so much overhead involved with printing boxes and CDs, warehousing them, shipping them, updating them when you ship new versions, etc. Finally, even once you've resigned yourself to the cost of getting there and you've finally made it onto retail store shelves, it turns out that the retail experience isn't great for finding software anyway—its only benefit is that it's somewhere the average consumer knows to look. (Or at least it's somewhere they used to look; but with cheap software cut out of the picture, limited shelf space, and so on, I'm guessing fewer and fewer people bother!)
But the App Store changes all that: it offers a much more efficient distribution channel, where everyone on the platform will know to look. You can easily browse around, or search for something specific. When you find something you want, you simply click "Buy Now" and the app starts downloading and adds itself on your Dock. No more futzing about with figuring out how to buy something from yet another vendor's website, tracking license keys, and so on. You just find what you want, buy it, and start using it.
That's the experience we'd like all our customers to have, and that's why we're looking forward to publishing our apps in the Mac App Store.
10/24 UPDATE: From the comments, it seems some people are assuming that we're planning to stop selling software directly, i.e. to only offer our software through the Mac App Store. Sorry if that wasn't clear: we do intend to keep selling software from our own site as well, where we're able to offer trial downloads as well as discounts for upgrades, bundles, and volume purchases. We view the Mac App Store as a great alternative to retail stores (which have all those same limitations), not as a replacement for our own site (which doesn't). (Also, to be clear, we plan to charge the same list price both on our store and in the Mac App Store, just as we charge the same list price on our store and in retail.)
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iPad or Bust: 3 down, 2 to go!
Posted by Ken Case on 09.16.10 | 33 Comments
What a whirlwind of a year it's been! When the iPad was announced in January, I posted that we were planning to bring all five of our productivity apps to iPad. We've now shipped three of those five apps:
We're very proud of how well the iPad apps we've shipped so far are being received; they all have ratings which average four stars or better. And we're about to ship updates to each (with OmniFocus 1.1, OmniGraffle 1.3, and OmniGraphSketcher 1.3) which we'll be talking more about soon.
But we still have two more apps to ship!
First, a quick update on OmniPlan: we haven't really started on OmniPlan for iPad yet, because we're still busy building OmniPlan 2 for Mac. That's about to enter private beta; hopefully that process will give us a better sense of how close it is (and thus how soon we can start on the iPad app).
OmniOutliner is definitely closer, and we've made a lot of progress, but we've still got a ways to go.
When I say OmniOutliner has made a lot of progress, what I mean is this: it's currently able to read and view and edit and save OmniOutliner documents. But if there's one thing we've learned from building OmniFocus for iPad, it's that creating a great touch-based interface for text outlines is not an easy problem! It takes a lot of time. (Particularly when we have high standards for the animations: suddenly we have to worry about what the screen looks like through dozens of frames of animation, not just what it looks like before and after a change.) Creating a touchable outline wasn't easy to solve for OmniFocus, but at least there we knew what basic attributes each task would have: so we could decide which pieces of information to hide at what times, how to size and present everything to put your attention on the right pieces of information, etc. With OmniOutliner, on the other hand, every document gets to define its own schema, with different sets of columns, different summaries, etc., and we don't know what it all means and which bits of information are most important—so we have to build an interface which is much more general and flexible. It's fun work, but hard work and we still have a lot of it to do!
Meanwhile, Apple just gave developers a beta copy of iOS 4.2, which will be a free operating system update for the iPad and iPhone operating system when it ships in November. Since we still have a lot to do anyway, we think it makes the most sense to build OmniOutliner for iOS 4.2 (where we can take advantage of a number of its new features) rather than continuing to build OmniOutliner for iOS 3.2 and later scrambling to try to catch up with iOS 4.2's features. Since OmniOutliner for iPad will require iOS 4.2, it won't be out until sometime after that ships. (Though hopefully not long after!)
So, those are our plans at the moment! As I said in my original iPad or Bust! introduction, our plans change over time, so please don't rely on things happening exactly according to today's snapshot of those plans. But hopefully they will at least give you some insight into what we're doing and why, making it possible for you to decide whether we're going in a direction you're interested in.
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).
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Level up with Lynda.com courses for OmniFocus and OmniGraffle
Posted by Linda Sharps on 08.18.10 | 6 Comments
For the visual learners in the crowd, I thought I'd let you know there's now a comprehensive OmniFocus video training course available from Lynda.com. The training course offers more than 3 hours of info, but it's broken up into manageable 5-10 minute videos for your viewing pleasure. (I don't know about you, but the idea of sitting down to three and a half hours of anything is enough to send me packing. This is why I avoid all movies described as "epic" or "a sweeping cinematic masterpiece", because you totally know that's just shorthand for "better not drink anything before trying to watch this, unless your bladder is the size of an Airstream").
You'll need a Lynda.com subscription to watch the entire course, but there are a number of videos available for free so you can check out their approach and decide if it seems up your alley.
From the course description:
Join Chris Mattia in OmniFocus Essential Training as he shares how to capture and organize projects and action items into a system for managing tasks and getting work done. This course covers working with projects and contexts, dynamically building to-do lists, creating custom views with Perspectives, and synchronizing the OmniFocus database across multiple computers. Exercise files are included with the course.
Topics include:
The philosophy behind OmniFocus
Creating an actions list
Organizing projects with folders and action groups
Scheduling parallel and sequential actions
Adding photos and audio to actions
Integrating with iCal and Mail
Backing up and exporting data
Using the OmniFocus iPhone appAlso, don't forget—there's an online training course for OmniGraffle, too. There! I just planned out your whole weekend for you. It's gonna be awesome.
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OmniGraffle 5.2.3 is now available
Posted by Joel on 06.16.10 | Comment
After a beta testing period that got somewhat interrupted by WWDC and submitting OmniGraffle 1.2 for iPad to the App Store, we're happy to announce that the final versions of OmniGraffle and OmniGraffle Professional 5.2.3 are ready and available for download.
For those not following the beta releases, version 5.2.3 fixes some important bugs with respect to Bézier lines and how they connect to shapes, fixes some important issues when exporting to other formats, and adds file management options when exporting to various OmniGraffle formats to better get your files working on the iPad.
Find the disk images at our download page, and read up on the lengthy history of OmniGraffle at our historical release notes page.
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OmniGraffle 5.2.3 release candidate 1 is now available
Posted by Joel on 06.02.10 | Comment
Testing of OmniGraffle 5.2.3 beta 2 went well over the last two weeks, so we're ready to go for a release candidate. As is usual policy around here, we'll let the RC bake for a couple of weeks and then go final if nothing bad happens.
Disk images and release notes covering the history of version 5.2.3 can be found at the bottom of the OmniGraffle download page.
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Using OmniGraffle for iPad as a wireframing tool: new video posted
Posted by Linda Sharps on 05.24.10 | 3 Comments
Say, have you ever found yourself trying to mock up a website with only a wet piece of toilet paper and a broken crayon and it's not fun at ALL because because the crayon is that cruddy "atomic tangerine" color and the toilet paper is one-ply and you are, like, totally building the worst website ever?
Well, have we ever got a handy video for you, then! We just posted our latest video overview, which is a mere 2:32 of your time but nicely covers the basics for using OmniGraffle for iPad to create website wireframes. This video is not only handy and informative, it also features the smooth vocal stylings of our wonderful Support Ninja and Talented Video-Maker, Kris.
Take a look at the video here, and if there are other topics you'd like to see us cover—for OmniGraffle for iPad or any other app—please let us know!
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OmniGraffle 5.2.3 beta 2 is now available
Posted by Joel on 05.19.10 | 1 Comment
We've added a couple of small fixes in this beta release, one that has to do with canvas names being incorrect on an export to HTML imagemap that was due to a different fix in beta 1, and Bézier lines should be back to normal, with the addtition of routing better according to their control handles when both endpoints are in the same location.
The beta's at the bottom of the download page, as are the release notes, short as they are.