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Design Report: OmniOutliner for iPad Styles

Posted by Bill Van Hecke on 08.16.11 | 3 Comments

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?”
OmniOutliner for iPad sells 10,000 copies in first three weeks

Posted by Ken Case on 06.02.11 | 10 Comments

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).
OmniOutliner for iPad is now available!

Posted by Ken Case on 05.12.11 | 51 Comments

I'm very pleased to announce that OmniOutliner for iPad is now available on the App Store for $19.99!

We've posted screenshots and a video tutorial on our OmniOutliner for iPad pages, and here's the official press release:

The Omni Group Brings OmniOutliner to the iPad

OmniOutliner for iPad Enables Users to Efficiently Create, Collect and Organize Information on the Popular Tablet

SEATTLE – May 12, 2011 – The Omni Group, a developer of productivity applications for Mac and iOS, today announced that OmniOutliner is now available on the iPad. The iPad edition of the company’s popular note-taking and outlining program offers users the ability to create, collect and organize information in a multitude of ways including creating to-do lists and agendas, managing tasks and expenses, taking notes and planning events. OmniOutliner for iPad is available for purchase on the App Store.

Industry analysts forecast that 52 million tablets are estimated to be shipped in 2011, with the iPad comprising 75 percent of these shipments. While iPad and other tablets have been traditionally used for consuming content on the web, watching videos, reading e-books and listening to music, selecting the right tools and apps can easily optimize the iPad for use as a mobile computing platform for business.

"The moment we learned about the iPad we knew it marked a shift in the direction of personal computing devices," said Ken Case, CEO and founder of the Omni Group. "Each time we bring a productivity app to the iPad we redesign it from the ground up to take advantage of this new platform, and OmniOutliner for iPad is no exception. Our team has done an amazing job of making the app easier to use than ever, without sacrificing the app's power. OmniOutliner is the app I turn to whenever I want to collect and structure my thoughts, and it's great to be able to take my outlines with me and work with them wherever I am."

OmniOutliner for iPad includes the powerful features specifically designed to help iPad users get the job done simply and easily:

Rich Text Styling– Fully customizable text styling options provide users with the same functionality as expected from a word processor with a simplified style system that’s already available in OmniOutliner 3.

Simple Outline Restructuring– OmniOutliner for iPad affords users the ability to easily rearrange and drag rows individually. Additionally, users can mark multiple rows to either group or move them at the same time.

Multiple Column Formats– In addition to text, OmniOutliner for iPad provides column options for numbers, duration, pop-up lists, and date types, many of which include their own specific data formatting options.

Inline Image Support– OmniOutliner for iPad allows users to paste images directly into their documents, which will be displayed inline.

Improved Document Sharing– With OmniOutliner for iPad, files can be emailed or uploaded to users’ MobileMe accounts or any other WebDAV servers. Files may also be transferred with iTunes, and can be sent in HTML, plain text, or OPML using the above methods.

Compatible with OmniOutliner 3– OmniOutliner for iPad is completely compatible and interchangeable with files generated in OmniOutliner 3.

Ability to Import OPML Files– OmniOutliner for iPad allows users to import OPML files, a common format used by basic outlining applications, directly into the application.

OmniOutliner for iPad is more than just an outlining tool, offering multiple columns, smart checkboxes, customizable popup lists, and an innovative styles system within a few easy clicks. The app’s document structure is effective for brainstorming new ideas, drilling out project specifics, and lining up the steps needed to get everything done.

OmniOutliner for iPad is available for $19.99 on the App Store at www.itunes.com. More information about OmniOutliner for iPad is available at www.omnigroup.com/omnioutliner-ipad/.

###

About the Omni Group

One of the first companies to develop software for the Mac OS X platform, the Omni Group is a leading developer for Apple products and has designed several productivity applications for Mac OS X, iPhone, and now iPad. Founded in 1993, the Omni Group is located in Seattle.

We hope you enjoy our latest app!
OmniOutliner for iPad: First Screenshots!

Posted by Ken Case on 05.09.11 | 56 Comments

When I announced last week that OmniOutliner for iPad had been submitted to the App Store, I noted that we were still busy putting together our marketing materials which explain what the app does in more detail. Well, we just finalized our App Store description and screenshots, so I'd like to share those with you now:

OmniOutliner starts as a blank page. But as you collect, compose, and rearrange text, its powerful outlining features emerge to organize your ideas. Hierarchy, columns, styling, notes — use them all in concert or keep things simple, depending on the project at hand. From basic lists and tables to serious writing and data wrangling, OmniOutliner understands how to keep your work structured and tidy.

Why choose OmniOutliner for iPad?

COMFORT: OmniOutliner was designed with speed and ease in mind, especially for data entry. Carefully-planned keyboard interactions and the ever-present Edit bar make it straightforward to add and rearrange items. Your ideas are what’s important — OmniOutliner just helps you get them in order.

STRUCTURE: Expand and collapse groups to concentrate on what’s important now. Use the flyout Plus buttons to put new items right where you need them. And of course, just drag items around when you need to rearrange the order. If you need to make a bigger change, use Edit mode to move or modify a bunch of rows at once.

COLUMNS: Checkboxes, formatted numbers, pop-up lists, dates… Keep track of any number of different fields in each row. If you have too many columns to see at once, you can hide some. Or just temporarily slide them underneath the main outline column to get at the ones you’re interested in. You can even sort your rows by any column, then restore their original order.

STYLES: Thanks to the included sample documents and styles, you may never need to adjust anything yourself. But if you want to, check out our custom rich-text editor, with more detailed styling than you’re likely to find anywhere else on iPad. Save your favorites as named styles, for quick and consistent styling across your document. Even chain styles together to automatically change rows based on their position in the hierarchy.

NOTES: Inline notes make it easy to keep track of ideas for future revisions, ancillary content, reviewers’ comments, ill-considered notions, snide jokes, and other miscellaneous info. You can attach notes to any row in a document, and show or hide them individually or en masse. And of course, notes can be styled just as precisely as the main content.

LINKS & ATTACHMENTS: Web addresses you type automatically get linkified. And any image you can copy and paste, from tiny embellishments to sketches from a drawing app to full-sized photos, can be placed right in your outline.

SHARING: OmniOutliner has no shortage of ways to share your documents. Import and export via iDisk, WebDAV, or email, in several formats: OmniOutliner (compatible with OmniOutliner 3 for Mac), OPML (compatible with other outlining applications), HTML, or good old-fashioned plain text. You can even choose a dynamic HTML export with expandable and collapsible groups.

SUPPORT: If you have any feedback or questions, we'd love to hear from you! The Omni Group offers free tech support: you can reach us by email at omnioutliner@omnigroup.com, by phone at 1-800-315-6664 or +1-206-523-4152, or on twitter at @omnioutliner.

Thank you!

And now, the screenshots!

Sadly, the App Store only allows for five screenshots. Fortunately, our blog has no such limitation, so here are a few more!

Again, we don't know exactly how long it will take for OmniOutliner to be reviewed, but hopefully it won't take too much longer. Once it has been approved, we'll post a specific launch date and time—so if you haven't seen anything here yet, there's no need to keep checking the App Store. In fact, 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. Or you can follow @omnigroup or @omnioutliner on twitter.

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). Thanks for taking the time to read this!
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.
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).
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).
Paul’s story: OmniOutliner

Posted by Linda Sharps on 03.09.10 | 7 Comments

While everyone else in this office goes completely insane working to meet iPad deadlines (seriously, one of our engineers put in something like 20 straight hours of code commits yesterday, which, well, I'm not saying one of our products will for SURE have a weird feature involving a Dali painting and a flurry of Pig Latin, I'm saying it's a POSSIBILITY), I thought I'd share the first of an ongoing series of blog posts unofficially titled OMNI APPS—IN ACTION.

You have to imagine the IN ACTION part with jazz hands, okay? Otherwise the whole title thing just sounds kind of stupid, like something I made up like two seconds ago while drinking a third Red Bull. Ha ha! As if.

Anyway, the idea here is just to share some stories of how people are using our software, which will hopefully provide a little inspiration and maybe even teach you something cool you didn't already know.

We're going to start with Paul Zagaeski, a technology analyst and marketer who relies on OmniOutliner in his job. Not sure how an outline can help you in your work? Read what Paul has to say:

An outliner app has been my most frequently used writing tool since I bought my first computer in 1983. I've always been a words-type thinker (rather than a visual or picture thinker), so I'm drawn to tools that help me organize words fast and efficiently. I can't recall any writing project I've ever tackled that didn't start with some kind of outline.

An outliner helps me keep a sense of control over both the process of writing, and all the content as I research and write draft text. Dave Dunham described outlining as being similar to building a ship: keel, framework, planks, deck, masts are assembled in a connected structure. Writing is starting with an idea or problem, adding questions or main issues to cover, doing research to address the issues, doing analysis and comparison on the facts from the research, deciding what it means, deciding what to say as a conclusion. If writing fiction, it's the same process only using plot points, characters, scenes, dialogue. The key thing I learned about writing is that you don't go from A to Z, stopping at every letter in turn. It's always a jumbled process of adding ideas, gathering bits of information, drafting actual text, and reorganizing, while jumping from one part of the project to another as needed. If I didn't have a writing tool that let me add, move, collapse, expand, sort, number, list, and stick in odd bits of things like pictures and links, it would take me much longer to do half as much.

Paul is currently using OmniOutliner to complete a pair of technology business reports for the site GigaOm Pro. These reports cover the market for digital paid content and the technologies that allow users to quickly and easily pay for things online or on mobile devices. Here's how OmniOutliner is making his job easier:

I used Outliner as my research tool to collect articles and other online content, to record phone interviews and then transcribe the good stuff, and to write notes and comments to myself on what I thought of the material and how I might use it.

Then I used Outliner to create a full outline of the report with headings and key words. I started drafting the sections, starting with company profiles and working backward to describe the market dynamics and business drivers. I pasted in links to the articles I wanted the reader to click through to get more information about a particular company, event, technology, or another writer's point of view. I also pasted in images and graphics I wanted to use in the report. I moved sections around until I thought the report flowed logically from topic area to topic area. Then I exported the whole thing to .RTF and imported it into Microsoft Word for revisions, more writing, and formatting. The document was supposed to be 30 pages, and I found I had written 80+ pages in Outliner! Eventually I divided the report into two documents and they'll be published separately.

Paul says his only challenge with using Outliner was having to apply MS Word styles to each paragraph after importing into Word (but that's because he can't run Office 2008 on his older Powerbook—OmniOutliner Pro can export outline style information that's picked up by the latest version of Word). The biggest benefits: being able to quickly collapse the report and get a good sense of the flow of topics, being able to focus on single sections at a time to write and rewrite them, and being able to record his phone interviews right on his Mac and then transcribe them so he could get all the facts straight.

Thank you, Paul, for letting us share some of the details behind your OmniOutliner workflow. You can read more from Paul at his blog, find him on LinkedIn, or follow him on Twitter.

Do you have an Omni App (in ACTION) story of how you're using our software? Let me know in the comments or via email, I'd love to hear it.