The Omni Group

A while ago I returned from a family vacation to discover that our cat had gone missing. While the cat is at least 87% evil and often spends her time stealth-barfing into my shoes, I was concerned. After a worrying amount of time had elapsed and walking around shouting her name into various bushes had produced no results (well, other than being forever known as the Crazy Neighborhood Cat Lady), I turned to the one piece of software I knew could help.

That's right: OmniGraffle.

Exactly one day later, our cat made a dramatic reappearance – slightly haggard but no worse for wear.

COINCIDENCE?

I think not.

OmniGraffle: it has the page layout functions to find your lost cat. I'm in marketing, so what I say must be true!

(Note: your lost cat results may vary. Offer void where prohibited, taxed or restricted. Current version of OmniGraffle recommended for all cat-location activities.)

:::

Okay, now for some blog content you might actually care about: an update on the Omni “GTD app” progress.

Well, I don't have much news yet. Sorry, that's kind of a sucky update, but it's the truth. We have lots of feedback from everyone and a plan of sorts (including a UI mockup that is actually very exciting), it's now a matter of finding engineering resources and re-prioritizing other projects.

We're still really interested in doing this, and we are going to keep you posted on what we're doing. Hopefully when the engineers are back from WWDC we'll be able to start making some real progress.

Finally, it's been suggested that using the term “GTD” when referring to this project is maybe not such a hot idea, so we need a good code name. Want to give us one? Best suggestion wins a software license of your choice. Extra points given for sophomoric humor, pop culture references, or anything that makes us email your idea around internally with the subject line “OMG OUR USERS ARE CRAZY”. The comments sections awaits!

Well, the final release of OmniGraffle 4.1.2 has come and gone. I, much like Wim, feel that the 4.1 branch is now dead to me. This has been a very cautious release than ones past—From the initial 4.0 release to the rush of getting the universal binary version of 4.1 ready in time to patching up that release in 4.1.1, it was actually somewhat relaxing to take a slow approach this time.

Lots of little nit-picky issues and regressions that got introduced in the rush of 4.1 are now addressed and fixed, problems with inspectors corrected, Intel-specific problems cleaned up.

We hope you enjoy it.

Bug Fixes

• Diagram style preferences are now accessible to AppleScript and can be named without specifying the full path to the style.
• Fixed the use of the Enter or Return key in the Text Position Inspector on Intel machines.

• Clicking in a different input field in the Text Position Inspector will now act the same as Enter or Return on PPC machines.

• Escape key should now allow user to back out of the zoom field, restoring previous zoom setting.

Download OmniGraffle

Graffletopia rocks. A great interface for browsing and getting OmniGraffle stencils, and Patrick says he'd definitely like to add other extras down the road.

Check it out.

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.

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