The Omni Group

Another round of private (but just about public) testing!

In the past year we’ve written a bit about both 2013 and OmniOutliner 4; now we’re ready to let you see the next generation.

Who?

We’d like anyone who uses OmniOutliner on most days to give it a go. Have a particular template or document you live out of? Try your workflows in OmniOutliner 4 and let us know if bugs happen. Real-world information here is extremely critical to a great public release of v4.

It’s important to note that OmniOutliner 4 has been completely rewritten and requires Mountain Lion (10.8).

If you’re in and have the time, sign up for the private OmniOutliner Test. We’re sending out the first round of invitations…

When?

Right now! Well, shortly after you sign up anyway. We’d like to get tens to hundreds of thousands of private testing hours before starting a “Hey stranger, come download this app” public test.

If you emailed us on your own accord in the past few months, you should have already received your invitation to test.

Is there anything missing?

Not missing, but possibly buggy! In February we finished adding the bulk of support for AppleScript (rewritten!) and printing (rewritten!), and you’ll see audio recording show up soon, too.

And the final version?

We’ll know when we’re ready after hearing from you. We want OmniOutliner 4 to be just as stable as OmniOutliner 3, and a good group of private testing with a lot of unique usage helps a great amount. Sign up, give it a go, and let us know what you find!

When we decided to bring all our apps to iPad, we immediately started hearing from our customers that it wasn’t enough to just bring desktop-class productivity apps to the best mobile platform: all of the documents in those apps needed to be mobile as well, so you’d always have the latest copies of your documents available on all of your devices.

As I shared in my January blog post, we’ve been hard at work on this problem for quite a while now and our solution to this is called “OmniPresence”: your documents, synced everywhere you want them to be.

What is OmniPresence?

• OmniPresence is a way to sync folders between your devices using a web server.
• On Mac, a separate OmniPresence app churns away silently in the background, syncing any documents placed in its folders—without requiring any special support from other apps. On iOS, the sandboxing environment requires that each app add its own support for OmniPresence—so we’ll be providing free updates for all our apps (and publishing code so other developers can add support if they wish).
• OmniPresence separates document syncing from any particular back end service provider. You can use it with your own compatible web server, or with the Omni Sync Server for documents created with your Omni apps.

Here is what OmniPresence looks like in action:

… and we’re finally at the point where it’s time to enlist your help in testing this code before we ship it!

The good news is that we’ve already heard from over a thousand of you who would be happy to help us test OmniPresence. The bad news is that we can’t open this up to all of you, because we have a very limited number of slots available for testing development versions of our iOS apps.

If you’re interested in helping us test OmniPresence, here are some questions we’ll need you to answer:

1. Do you have a good strategy for backing up your documents in case something goes awry? You’re helping us test unreleased software, and one of the risks is that it might have bugs which delete or silently corrupt your data.
2. Will you be able to use OmniPresence frequently over the next few weeks? If you don’t have time to help us this month, it would be better to give this slot to someone else.
3. Are you willing to store your documents on the Omni Sync Server—or, alternatively, to patch, build, install, configure, and deploy your own copy of the Apache web server? We’ve submitted several updates to Apache which haven’t been integrated by their team yet, so if you’re uncomfortable storing data on our server you’ll need to set up your own server with those updates in place. (If you plan to use the Omni Sync Server, please tell us your account name so we can enable OmniPresence testing for it.)

And two bonus questions:

1. Which of our apps do you use? We’re adding OmniPresence support to OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, and OmniGraphSketcher, and an ideal tester would be someone who uses all three. (Note: OmniPresence provides no benefit to OmniFocus and OmniPlan, since they already have built-in support for syncing individual changes.)
2. Are you a developer who is interested in adding OmniPresence support to your own app? We’re not quite ready to publish our source code yet, but we do plan to and it would be great to get feedback from other developers before we unleash this into the wild.

Please email your responses to omnipresence@omnigroup.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

In my last blog post, I reflected on all the things we accomplished in 2012 here at Omni—in particular, the completion of our huge “iPad or Bust!” initiative. But as Professor Hathaway said to Chris Knight, “That was yesterday. What have you done for me today?”

With “iPad or Bust!” out of the way, we’ve been able to move some of our projects off the back burner and here are some highlights of what’s coming: OmniFocus 2. OmniOutliner 4. Automatic document syncing. Sandboxing. Accessibility. Visio and Microsoft Project compatibility in our iPad apps. Upgrade pricing from Mac App Store apps.

Let’s start with OmniFocus 2! For OmniFocus 2, we’re bringing back to the Mac all of the design and innovation that went into our iPad edition of OmniFocus: dedicated Forecast and Review modes, clearer navigation, and a fresh look and feel. I’m looking forward to sharing it with you! At 6pm on January 31, you’re invited to join Merlin Mann, David Sparks, and me for the first public debut of OmniFocus 2. This will be a free event, hosted at the Cartoon Art Museum (a short walk from Macworld/iWorld), and anyone who attends will get early access to the OmniFocus 2 private beta. Space is limited, so if you plan to attend please let us know.

Next up: OmniOutliner 4! I know many of you have been waiting for this upgrade for a long time—I know I have been waiting for this for a long time! For those of you who might not know the history, OmniOutliner 3 shipped in January, 2005—one year before Macs transitioned to Intel processors. And OmniOutliner 3 certainly hasn’t sat still over the last eight years: we’ve ported to Intel processors and added support for Spotlight, dictionary lookups, LinkBack, Automator workflows, Quick Look, custom toolbars, Word 2008 export, Auto Save, and Versions. But other than a few tweaks to the inspectors and toolbars, its design has mostly stayed the same: it’s starting to feel a bit long in the tooth. So… it’s due.

What’s coming in OmniOutliner 4? We’ve completely rebuilt the outlining engine to support zooming text, showing and hiding columns, and we’ve improved link handling and attachments. We’ve designed a new style system which emphasizes named styles and simplifies the styles interface. And it’s built on a modern 64-bit architecture, with a fresh new look and feel. OmniOutliner 4 isn’t finished yet, but it’s getting close: it’s now at the point where I’m using it to edit all my outlines rather than OmniOutliner 3, so I anticipate we’ll be ready for public beta sometime in the first quarter.

Automatic document syncing is almost here! We call it “OmniPresence”: your documents, synced everywhere you want them to be.

We’ve designed OmniPresence around open web protocols, so you’re welcome to use our free Omni Sync Server or to host your own cloud server. We think that the option to host your own cloud is important—not just because of concerns with respect to privacy and security (though that’s key for many businesses), but because it means you can keep that cloud running as long as you want to keep using it. As we saw with MobileMe shutting down earlier this year, individual cloud services can easily disappear as business models change. Building a solution around open standards means that our customers have a choice of hosting providers rather than being tied to a single ephemeral cloud solution.

OmniPresence is not limited to syncing with a single cloud, either: you can choose which folders to sync with which clouds. This means that teams can set up separate folders in separate clouds, and you can access files from any of them on each of your devices.

Because it’s open and you can host your own cloud, OmniPresence is designed to sync any documents you want: it’s not limited to syncing documents created by our apps. In fact, on the desktop OmniPresence is completely independent of our other apps: if you wish, you can use it to sync TextEdit documents! (But when using OmniPresence with non-Omni apps, we’ll ask that you limit the amount of space you use on our Omni Sync Server since we can’t provide infinite storage to everyone for free. On your own cloud server, though, do whatever you want!)

On iOS, OmniPresence isn’t quite that independent: the sandboxing environment requires that each app embed the OmniPresence logic within its own codebase. We will be publishing our source code for free so other developers can add it to their apps.

OmniFocus 2, OmniOutliner 4, and OmniPresence. Three major upgrades, all coming your way in Q1, 2013.

But as I noted at the top, that’s not all! We’re also working on sandboxing to help keep your Mac safe; and accessibility (currently in private beta for OmniOutliner for iPad) to make our apps easier to use by those who are visually impaired. And we’ve been working on adding Visio and Microsoft Project compatibility to our iPad apps, so it will be easier than ever to go completely mobile with your work.

Finally, with OmniFocus 2 coming we’ve been thinking a lot about how to implement upgrade pricing from Mac App Store apps. As always, we plan to offer discounted upgrade pricing on our own online store, but unfortunately we don’t have the flexibility to offer selective discounts in the Mac App Store. We’ve decided to treat the Mac App Store the same way as we treat retail stores: it’s a great way to discover our software, and can give you confidence that it’s been vetted by a third party. And, just as you wouldn’t get a discount from a retail store if you purchase OmniGraffle 5 while owning OmniGraffle 4, you won’t get a discount if you purchase OmniFocus 2 from the Mac App Store. But we’re in the process of updating our store so that you’ll be able to register your Mac App Store apps to get a discounted upgrade price when you buy an update directly from us.

OmniFocus 2. OmniOutliner 4. OmniPresence. Sandboxing. Accessibility. Visio and Microsoft Project compatibility in our iPad apps. Upgrade pricing from Mac App Store apps. I hope you’re looking forward to 2013 as much as we are! (And don’t forget to let us know if you’re planning to come to the OmniFocus 2 debut!)

As we approach the end of 2012 (or the world, according to some), I’ve been reflecting on just how much we’ve accomplished this year here at Omni.

We celebrated 20 years of omnigroup.com, of course, and we moved to new offices. But, more importantly, we finished our two-and-a-half-year “iPad or Bust!” initiative by shipping the last of those five apps, OmniPlan for iPad! Version 1.0 doesn’t mark the end of all our work, of course—but it’s a great milestone and I’m incredibly proud of all our team has accomplished.

Finishing up our “iPad or Bust!” initiative has given us the opportunity to start working through a number of other projects on our “to do” lists, so there’s been a lot of news in 2012…

We rolled out our own Omni Sync Server, so you don’t have to become a sysadmin and run your own web server just to sync your devices. (But you can still run your own server if you like: our syncing engine is based on open web protocols.)

OmniFocus has been on speaking terms with Siri since late 2011, of course, but in 2012 we’ve made it more robust and brought support for Siri to the iPad app as well. We also added support for flexible weekly repeats and TextExpander—and just this month we’ve started beta testing our new Mail Drop which lets you email tasks directly to your OmniFocus database.

This year Apple introduced iPads with Retina displays, and we immediately shipped Retina updates for all of our iPad apps. Apple also introduced Retina displays to the Mac with the new MacBook Pro, and we’ve already shipped Retina updates for OmniGraffle and OmniPlan (and are busy working on Retina updates for the rest of our Mac apps).

Behind the scenes, we’ve also been updating all our Mac apps to leverage the latest fundamental advances in OS X: this year we shipped Developer ID-signed updates for all our apps, 64-bit updates for OmniGraffle, OmniDiskSweeper, and OmniDazzle—and we expect to ship 64-bit updates for the rest of our apps soon. We’ve also been hard at work adopting OS X’s new App Sandbox.

Even before we finished “iPad or Bust!” one of our top priorities has been to build automatic document syncing into OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, and OmniGraphSketcher—we want it to be as easy to sync all our apps as it is to sync OmniFocus and OmniPlan. We’ve been working on this for over a year and a half now, and at the start we had very promising results: it felt like magic when it worked, and we thought we’d be ready to ship last year. But though our code was finished, we found the back end service we were trying to use wasn’t working reliably, and we felt it would be irresponsible to ship something so critical until we knew the full solution was solid. After a year of trying to help get that solution working, we went back to the drawing board and designed a new syncing solution based on open web protocols. Nobody was more disappointed about the delay this caused than we were—but we knew we needed to find some way to move forward, and I’m pleased to report that the redesign has gone very well (and our new syncing solution is now in internal testing).

Which, of course, leads right into the subject of my next blog post: what’s coming next from Omni? (Stay tuned!)

Accessibility is important to us here at Omni, and we have a long history of supporting accessibility in our apps. (In 2002, we added speech recognition to OmniWeb so you could surf the web using voice commands and ask it to read pages back to you using text-to-speech—even before the operating system itself was accessible.)

Unfortunately, we’ve fallen behind in our support for accessibility over the last few years—on both Mac and iOS, but particularly on iOS. Until our apps are fully accessible, we won’t consider them complete.

To that end, we’ve been working on making OmniOutliner for iPad accessible. As anyone who has used an accessible app knows, good accessibility design goes deeper than just slapping on some accessibility tags. Once we’re sure we’re on the right track with OmniOutliner, we’ll move on to making OmniFocus accessible.

Our internal QA team has reviewed the work we’ve done so far, and we think it’s ready for some external beta testing. We can’t post public beta builds of our iOS apps, but if you’re interested in joining our private beta-testing pool please contact us at omnioutliner-ipad@omnigroup.com.

Thank you!

Hi, all!

It’s been almost one year since we shipped OmniOutliner for iPad. Every day since we shipped we’ve received feedback along the lines of “This looks great! But when will it automatically sync with OmniOutliner for Mac?”—and each time we reply back “We’re working on it!” But it’s been almost a year now, and I know you all must be wondering: Why is it taking so long to add automatic syncing to OmniOutliner?

To make documents with large embedded attachments more efficient, OmniOutliner 3 stores its documents as “file wrappers”, which behind the scenes are simply directories holding separate files which represent different parts of the document. (The outline itself is one file, and each attachment is its own separate file.) Unfortunately, most sync services don’t support syncing a directory as an atomic operation.

Wait, hold on, what does “atomic operation” mean? Well, in computer speak, an atomic operation is something that gets done all at once. In this case, we want all of the parts of the document to get synchronized to or from the cloud at the same time, otherwise different parts of the document might not be in sync with itself: it might be missing some attachments, or perhaps some of them will be out of date, or maybe there will be some extra attachments that shouldn’t be there.

In other words, when syncing OmniOutliner, it’s not just important to have all the parts eventually arrive on the other end; we want all of the parts of the document to show up on the other end at the very same time (and we want to know when they’ve all finished arriving) so that we know it’s safe to open and you won’t end up with a corrupt document.

One way to solve this syncing challenge is to change our document format—to stop storing OmniOutliner documents as directories behind the scenes. This change would make it much less efficient for attachments, but would also make it much more compatible with many file servers, email, web forms, source control systems, and so on. We can do that—but such a big change to the OmniOutliner file format won’t work with the currently shipping apps, and doesn’t really make sense to do before shipping OmniOutliner 4. So taking this route to solving the problem means for us to try to ship OmniOutliner 4 as soon as possible (which we’re certainly working very hard to do).

Another way to solve this problem is to help syncing solution providers (such as DropBox and iCloud) improve their support for atomic directory operations so we can sync using their solutions. The most promising option here by far is iCloud, since iCloud’s engineers explicitly do want to support syncing of file wrappers. We’ve had some of our most experienced developers spend much of the past year working on this approach—but much of that time was spent blazing new territory, and most issues we encountered weren’t within our control to fix because we don’t control the technology and servers. Fortunately, we think we’ve pushed through most of the critical issues and we’re hoping this approach will bear fruit soon.

Of course, if it takes too long to change our document format or to get atomic directory syncing working with other people’s cloud servers, another approach would be for us to add syncing support for our own cloud servers. We recently brought our Omni Sync Server out of beta, and we’re using it now to automatically sync OmniFocus and OmniPlan.

One way or another, we’re working very hard to bring automatic syncing to OmniOutliner as soon as possible: we know it’s absolutely critical for anyone who wants to use OmniOutliner on more than one device. We’re very sorry it’s taking so long!

As always, we welcome your feedback! Please feel free to leave a comment here or on our forums, or by sending me a message on twitter (where you’ll find me at @kcase).

Howdy, friend-os! Today, I get to do something we’ve been looking forward to for a while now: announce that the Omni Sync Server is coming out of beta.

We’ve had the server up for almost two years now - it launched way back in April of 2010. In that time, the server has been scaled up from a Mac mini here in our offices to a collection of machines in our colocation facility, all working together to help you move your Omni apps’ data back and forth between your OS X and iOS devices, as well as to store backup copies of that data just in case things go totally diggstown and you need them.

When we launched the server, it was an OmniFocus-only affair, but we’ve added support for the server to all of our iOS apps. On the Mac, OmniFocus and OmniPlan have built-in support for the server as well. (The Mac apps that don’t already include support will get it in the future.)

So, to the tens of thousands of folks out there that have been storing your data on the server this whole time: thank you very much for being willing to sign up and help us build this thing. There’s always a seat for you on our little red wagon. To everyone else: if you were interested in using the server but didn’t want to sign up while it was in in a testing phase, we’re rolling out the red carpet for you. Head over to omnigroup.com/sync and set up an account.

Oh, and did we mention that you can have this all for the low, low price of zero? One of the things we learned is that we can build and run a service like this without needing to charge for it. Consider it a delicious after-dinner digestif you get whenever you buy one of our apps. Enjoy!

Hallo. The styles system in OmniOutliner for Mac is a good example of an interface that, if you take the time to master it, provides pretty bewildering amounts of power. If you don’t take the time to master it, well, it mostly does its job whilst hovering somewhere between nifty and wacky. When creating OmniOutliner for iPad, we wanted to take a fresh stab at styles, and see if we could give the same underlying system a more sensible interface.

Respecting Row Boundaries

OmniOutliner for Mac behaves like a word processor: once you turn on a style attribute, that style is in effect until you decide to turn it off:

But part of what makes an outline an outline is that rows are distinct, discrete objects. You can select them individually, shuffle them around, and keep them more organized than a simple stream of text. So on iPad, we stopped propagating styles across row boundaries:

This one small change made a big difference in how the app feels. Rather than trying to be smart and guessing what you might want for each row, we erred on the side of containment and predictability.

Emphasizing Named Styles

OmniOutliner for Mac makes it easy to set up one-time custom styles on text. Just select something and start messing with the inspectors. That’s great, except that it can pretty quickly lead to myriad slightly-different one-off styles. Maybe some of your headings are 16-point size, while others are 15. Some highlights are one shade of yellow, while others are a slightly different one. And if you ever want to change any of those styles, you’ll need to go back and edit them one by one.

The better way, of course, is named styles. Set up a style once, and then use it over and over. If you edit the style, all instances of it change too. To encourage the use of named styles on iPad, we did two things.

First, we included several document templates, each with its own suite of carefully-constructed named styles. This is in line with our observance of sensible defaults — offering good initial settings with an app is even more important than, and can often preclude the need for, customization. In other words, it’s not good enough to let people make cool stuff as long as they are willing to do the setup — they should be able to make cool stuff without any setup at all.

Second, we put the ad-hoc styling controls one panel deeper than the named styles. You need to go past the existing named styles before you can get at the fiddly stuff. Hopefully, if there is a named style that does what you want, you’ll notice it before going and doing the work yourself.

Replacing the Styles Palette, the Style Attributes Inspector, and the Style Matrix

The Mac version makes it easy to set up complex automatic style hierarchies; in fact, it’s too easy. If you want to make good use of that power, you have to get comfortable with the Styles Palette, the Style Attributes Inspector, and the Styles View matrix. Each of these appears in a different place and is used for a slightly different purpose.

For iPad, we wanted to offer 90% of the functionality people want, with about 10% of the effort. Most importantly, we wanted to stop compromising the experience of casual users in order to offer esoteric functionality to power users. As the Alan Kay quotation goes, “simple things should be simple; complex things should be possible.”

Simple things should be simple

In reality, your relationship with styles is that you almost always just want to select a row and choose a style. On the Mac, this simple action is not as simple as it could be to perform. You open the Style Palette to see which styles are available (assuming you made some). Then you drag a style from the palette to the row in your outline. Then you can select the row and open the Style Attributes inspector to see which styles are applied.

On the iPad, we made it super simple: tap a row, tap the Inspector button, and tap a style; the style gets a checkmark to show that it’s applied. This uses the select-then-modify interaction people are familiar with, and combines the list of available styles with the indication of which styles are applied.

Complex things should be possible

In OmniOutliner for Mac, you can set up very precise automatic style hierarchies (like great-great-grandchildren of this particular row should be italic and blue and get the Citation style). But this means as you grow your document, you have a geometrically-increasing number of little style chits to keep under control. The Styles palette is constantly showing you all the level styles, encouraging you to customize them. Every row in your document has a style slot for every level of descendants! But, since you don’t actually often need to use such stuff, we wanted to stop putting it in front of you all the time.

Instead, on the iPad we’ve replaced that entire system with a single “children’s style” attribute on each named style. (For instance, you can say that children of Heading 1 rows get the Heading 2 style.) You can use it to chain together styles and get the same effects as before, but the interface for it is tucked away instead of in your face, and it takes quite a few taps to set up long chains.

Yep, we actually intentionally made automatic level-based styles a bit harder to do, because it let us drastically simplify the way we represent styles. And the difficulty is not that big of a deal because we could provide sensible default documents where the chain was already set up. That way, you can customize our chain when you need one, and forget about the feature altogether when you don’t.

The complexity-to-difficulty curve

Lots of desktop software starts out hard, and gets a little harder when you want to do something really demanding. But you can do pretty much everything you could realistically want to do. iPad software, though, starts out really easy, and then more steeply increases in difficulty as you try to do more complicated stuff. Eventually you hit a point where you can’t do certain elaborate tasks at all.

Why? Because it’s actually quite rare that you want to do something that complicated! Almost everything you want to do in your day-to-day life is way to the left of the intersection of these difficulty curves. Accommodating the elaborate cases would almost certainly compromise simplicity for the normal stuff. The whole iPad experience is more than happy to sacrifice the super power-user workflow in favor of the commonest cases.

So much of software design is deciding what you want your complexity-to-difficulty curve to look like: where it begins, how it ramps up, and where it cuts off entirely. In fact, while I was composing this post, Lukas Mathis made an excellent post exploring various apps’ graphs of experience versus depth: The Growing User and the Perennial Beginner.

However you visualize it, consider: “Who is this product for? What should their first-run experience be like? What about their one-hundredth-run experience? And can we stay useful enough for them to have a one-thousandth-run experience?”

Thanks to all our customers for your amazing show of support for serious iPad productivity apps!  Three weeks ago we launched OmniOutliner for iPad, and I'm very pleased to announce that we sold our 10,000th copy of the app yesterday.

More importantly, our reviews on the App Store are averaging four stars and we've been hearing great things about the app from all of you:

@stanlemon: @kcase your crew really knocked it out of the park today with @OmniOutliner for the iPad. Bravo!

@rwilcox: Omnioutliner iPad is so much more than I ever imagined. Never been so blown away.

@PaulWestlake: Used @OmniOutliner on the iPad in my first meeting today. Wow... This is going to replace so many of the apps on my iPad. Stunning. Buy it!

@JustOrtiz: OmniOutliner for iPad was the reason I wanted an iPad when it first came out. Well worth the wait. It's finally made the iPad what I need

@jdriscoll: Spent some time with OmniOutliner for iPad last night and was blown by the 1.0. Great work @omnigroup.

So with over 10,000 sales and great reviews it looks like version 1.0 is off to a great start!

But version 1.0 is just where our apps start, it's not where they end:  today we're putting the final touches on a version 1.0.2 update, which fixes a number of bugs and adds a few minor enhancements, such as autoscroll for dragging rows and document sorting by title.

And we won't be stopping at version 1.0.2 either, of course. Many of you have also asked us for a better document management interface and for automatic document synchronization, so those are some of our top priorities for the next few updates.  We've been inspired by the improvements Apple has made in the iWork apps earlier this week (yay, folders!), and we're also really looking forward to learning on Monday how Apple's upcoming iCloud service might fit into the picture.

…and all that said, I just got the word from QA that version 1.0.2 looks ready to go, so I'm off to go submit that now. Thanks for taking the time to read this, and thanks especially for all the great feedback over these first few weeks! Please keep it coming: we're looking forward to continuing to make this app better and better with each release. As always, you can reach me by leaving a comment here, or by sending me a message on twitter (where you'll find me at @kcase).

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