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OmniGraphSketcher Goes Logarithmic

Posted by Robin on 08.29.11 | 9 Comments

“Wow, your customers are nerdy!”

That was a friend’s response recently when I mentioned that logarithmic axes are the number-one feature request for OmniGraphSketcher.

The way I see it, our customers understand that logarithmic scales are the best way to present many types of data and ideas. Stock prices, advances in technology, and many other phenomena tend to change by multiples rather than additions. Logarithmic scales show each doubling as a constant distance, so you can compare percent changes without large differences in absolute size getting in the way.

So I’m very excited to announce that OmniGraphSketcher 1.2 for Mac and OmniGraphSketcher 1.5 for iPad are now available, with full support for logarithmic axes!

You don’t even need to know anything about logarithms to use this feature. You just turn it on via the axis inspector, for either or both axes. (The resulting charts are sometimes called lin-log and log-log.) There is no step two!

These logarithmic axes are designed to follow best practices in information visualization, and they work seamlessly with all the other features of the app, such as dragging, nudging, snapping, sketch recognition, axis manipulation, and scale-to-fit. And because logarithmic scales are more likely to span many orders of magnitude, we now support much larger and smaller numbers (up to 10³⁰⁰ and down to 10^-300), more decimal precision (up to 13 digits), and scientific notation (so you can use numbers like 3 x 10²⁰⁰ without typing 200 zeroes).

Given that the known sizes of physics only range from about 10^-35 meters (the Planck distance in quantum theory) up to 10²⁶ meters (the size of the observable universe), we figure that +/- 300 orders of magnitude should be plenty.

At least for now.

As part of these updates, we’ve also refined the algorithms that draw axis tick marks and tick labels. When there is not enough room to label every tick mark, we now consistently label every other tick mark, or every 5th, or every 10th, etc. If we skip a lot, we’ll automatically use major/minor tick marks to make it easier to see which tick marks are getting labeled.

On logarithmic axes, we show just the first five numbers between each power of ten when possible, then only the powers of ten themselves, and then evenly-spaced powers of ten. OmniGraphSketcher makes all of these decisions for you, so you never have to think about it.

And did I mention that your axis ranges don’t have to end on powers of ten? Suppose your data values fall between 8 and 200. In many charting programs, the best you can do is this:

But we think logarithmic axes should be just as flexible as linear ones, and we want you to be able to switch between linear and logarithmic scales seamlessly. Again, we’ve done the work so you can get what you’d expect:

Last but not least, we’ve added a really nifty new feature called line interpolation. As you know, OmniGraphSketcher lets you draw lines freehand even if you don’t have exact data to back them up. This is great if you have a rough idea of a trend or want to visualize several possible scenarios. But wouldn’t it be cool if you could also turn your sketched lines into sampled data points for analysis or re-plotting in another program? That’s exactly what line interpolation does. It samples at each horizontal tick mark (x-value) to convert your line into a data series.

The reason we’re introducing this at the same time as logarithmic axes is because it lets you see how the shape of a line differs in linear vs. logarithmic space. Regular lines in OmniGraphSketcher simply connect two or more data points as smoothly as possible, so intermediate values do not necessarily stay the same when you convert between linear and logarithmic scales. Line interpolation solves this by letting you anchor some of the intermediate points. Now you can easily demonstrate, for example, how a straight line in logarithmic space becomes an exponential curve in linear space:

Download the latest versions of OmniGraphSketcher from the App Store (Mac, iPad) or from our online store (Mac); or use the built-in software update to download automatically.

And let us know what you think!

(If you want all the details, check out the release notes for the Mac and iPad versions.)
A Nudge Forward

Posted by Robin on 06.23.11 | 4 Comments

Typically before we ship a new version of OmniGraphSketcher, I like to try using the app to re-create a real economics diagram based on a set of the most interesting graphs in an economics textbook. In other words, I try to simulate the experience of being an actual OmniGraphSketcher user.

The last time I did this, I was blown away by how easy it was to draw this professional-quality graph, right there on my iPad — just by tapping and dragging my fingers.

I mean, look at that! I could easily email it in PDF format directly to a textbook publisher.

There was one frustration, though. It was difficult and somewhat error-prone to precisely position text labels, especially when they were short, abbreviated variable names. The labels were mostly hidden under my finger, so adjusting them just right required zooming in as far as I could and even then having to guess if I was in exactly the right spot.

I knew that Apple's iWork applications had solved this problem with a "nudge" gesture, which you perform by holding one finger on the object to be adjusted and then swiping a second finger in the direction you want to nudge. The object being held shifts by one pixel per swipe. That feature was already on our very long to-do list, but no customers had ever requested it, so it was not in any immediate plans. Yet assembling this example graph made it clear that finely adjusting objects was the weakest link in our quest to make graph creation as quick and easy as possible.

I set about implementing the nudge gesture, which quickly turned into a major overhaul of our whole gesture recognition system. That overhaul made the other gestures more reliable, and it paved the way for new and interesting gesture shortcuts. For example, OmniGraffle for iPad now includes the ability to quickly send objects forward and backwards by pressing one finger on the selection while swiping two more fingers up (to send forward) or down (to send backward).

Now that OmniGraphSketcher for iPad includes the nudge gesture, creating that complex economics graph is really a breeze. You'd think I'd have gotten used to it by now, given that I've been developing the app ever since the iPad was announced and I know in detail how it all works. Yet Apple's term "magical" is still the best way I know of to describe what it feels like to use the app to make beautiful, accurate graphs.
iPad or Bust: OmniOutliner for iPad!

Posted by Ken Case on 05.05.11 | 31 Comments

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.
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.
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.

—

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).
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.)
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).
OmniGraphSketcher 1.1.1 now available

Posted by Dave on 05.20.10 | Comment

After a beta period that was a little longer than expected thanks to that pesky tablet, we're ready to go final with OmniGraphSketcher 1.1.1. If you participated in the beta, you already know that we've added Japanese and French localizations to OmniGraphSketcher. We've also improved support for international number formats (both for importing and display) and made lots of other tweaks and fixes.

OmniGraphSketcher 1.1.1 is available on our downloads page or via software update. Release notes are available in the usual spot (as well as the Help menu). As always, please don't hesitate to use the Send Feedback item in the Help menu, or email us with any questions or feedback.
OmniGraphSketcher for Mac 1.1.1 beta 4 now available

Posted by Dave on 05.04.10 | Comment

Thanks to everyone who has participated in the OmniGraphSketcher beta so far! We're approaching the final release of OmniGraphSketcher 1.1.1, so beta 4 has only a few changes. This release fixes some problems with international number formats and addresses some intermittent crashes. You can grab it from the downloads page, or via software update if you're already running an OGS beta. Keep those emails coming!
iPad or Bust: 2 down, 3 to go!

Posted by Ken Case on 04.15.10 | 39 Comments

Two and a half months ago, I announced that we were planning to bring all five of our productivity apps to iPad. Two weeks later, I wrote about some of the steps we were taking to make that happen. Now that iPad has shipped, I thought it might be good to review where we are now, and what our plans are going forward:

As the above graphic indicates, we've already made some great progress: two apps down, three to go!

OmniGraffle and OmniGraphSketcher are available now: they both launched with the App Store, and they've both been very well received—with App Store ratings averaging four stars. Of course, those were just our 1.0 releases, and we're not standing still: OmniGraphSketcher 1.1 for iPad adds data import and is already available as a free App Store update, while OmniGraffle 1.1 improves performance and stability and overall user experience and will be submitted to Apple for review very soon.

Meanwhile, I'm sure many of you are wondering about the other three apps: OmniFocus, OmniOutliner, and OmniPlan. We're currently working on OmniFocus and OmniOutliner in parallel. OmniFocus has a bit of a head start, thanks to the work we'd already done in bringing it to iPhone, so we anticipate its iPad app will be ready in June. OmniOutliner is a little further out, and our current projection is that it will ship this summer. Finally, after we've shipped those four apps, we'll round out the set with OmniPlan for iPad which we're currently anticipating will ship sometime this fall.

So that's where our iPad apps are today, and where we're going! Thanks for taking the time to read this, and for all of your support: over these first two weeks OmniGraffle has sold several thousand copies, making it one of the top apps in the iPad App Store! We've had a pretty amazing journey so far, and we couldn't do it without you.

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).