The Omni Group

View the full release notes then download it!

Happy Halloween, Omni blog readers! Troy is wearing a purple wig today, James is sporting some bright orange socks with bats on them (although for James that's a fairly typical fashion choice), Ken is wearing a lab coat, and Greg's son Miles has been transformed into…well, Darth Toddler:

Hee. I love the thumbs up gesture, there.

Okay! On to more questions, before all our pumpkins turn into…uh…chariots, or something.

Dan asks, Is there any sort of official list of ideas and feature requests for future releases?  Have you ever thought of doing something like an “OmniProduct Focus Group,” or is this something that would be completely unnecessary?

We definitely have an internal system for tracking ideas, feature requests, and bugs, and assigning things to specific target releases for all of our products. I'm guessing you're wondering more about a publicly available list, so you can see what's already been suggested? We don't have such a thing, exactly, but you can see what other people are talking about on our forums, and add your input there. Otherwise, we always welcome feedback via email, so please feel free to send us your requests.

As for a focus group, we've never hosted a formal type of group (the kind where you get free soda and people with clipboards peer at you from behind one-way mirrors), although we have asked people to join an “Alpha Brute Squad” where they get a really early look at our software (sometimes when it's in a mildly terrifying, devouring-its-own-tail state of bugdom!) and have a chance to provide feedback on features and UI before it goes into public beta.

I don't yet know what we'll be doing for OmniFocus, but I'd recommend signing up on this mailing list if you're interested in potentially being tapped for Brute Squad duty.

Kirk wonders, Any chance of transferring an Outliner license to Focus when it comes out?

Sort of. We will be offering discounted OmniFocus licenses for OmniOutliner customers, so while you won't be able to transfer one app license to another, you won't be charged full price either. We haven't made any final pricing decisions, but we definitely recognize that we need cross-product discounting.

David asks, How do I enter curved text in OmniGraffle?  That is, if I want a line of text to follow a curved path (like a squiggle or around a circle/arc), can it be done [...]?

Sorry, you can't created curved text in OmniGraffle (although you should be able to copy and paste it in from a graphic created elsewhere). If you don't have Illustrator, as you mentioned, maybe something like LineForm or EazyDraw would work?

Dan asked another question: is there a story for the change in the status of Omni's apps that come bundled with most Macs, with the switch to Intel?  (Specifically, the addition of OmniOutliner to all consumer Macs and the loss of OmniGraffle.)

If there's a story, only Apple knows it. We don't really have any influence over what Apple decides to include, or not include, in their hardware – we just review what they ultimately propose and decide if we want to say yea or nay. The expanded bundle deal for Outliner has been great, although in general I wish our software were easier to discover. You know, instead of being all tidily tucked away in the Applications folder, maybe it could be…sitting in the Dock? (Apple? I'm just sayin'.)

Nik asked several questions, most of which I've sent on to tech support,  but here's one for the blog: Is it possible to save an OmniOutliner document so that it's JUST the XML file and doesn't have the bundle “wrapper” around it? (Then I could check it into source control and stuff.)

You can check it into source control, I'm told. OmniOutliner supports CVS and SVN, so you can check it in as is, folders and all.

All righty then! This concludes today's Q&A With Omni. I may follow up with a third and final post on Thursday, so if you have any more questions, leave them in the fancy comment box.

And now, I'm off to help my son trample large metropolitan areas. RAARRRRR!

Release Notes:

• Stability

  • Fixed failure to load files with corrupted named style references.  Now, if a named style isn't found with a given unique identifier, we'll fall back to looking up by name.  If that fails, we'll just drop the reference instead of failing to load the file at all.
  • Fixed crash when clearing the undo stack after having dragged in a URL and then undone that change.
  • Exporting to flat file formats (CSV, plain HTML, etc.) will no longer raise an error when the document has metadata set in the document Spotlight inspector.

• Interface

  • The row expand/collapse animation will no longer be slow if you are holding down shift unless the animation is due to a mouse click.  French keyboard users (where numbers require shift) will no longer see the slow animation when using the keyboard shortcuts to expand and collapse rows.
  • Tabbed inspector icons should be colored appropriate for the selection before the first time the inspector is loaded.
  • Styles applied to the document title tag as well as styles applied in the document header view should now be reflected in the printed output.  In the case of a conflict, the style attribute set up in the document title view will win.
  • The spell checking panel 'Correct' button will now replace the first misspelled word when it is in a different row.
  • Inherited styles are now listed at the bottom of each section in the style attributes inspector.  This this follows the most specific to least specific layout in the rest of the inspector.
  • Clicking on an attachment, pausing, and then dragging will now drag the attachment as a file reference instead of as a text clipping.

Download OmniOutliner 3.6.2 beta 1

Download OmniOutliner Pro 3.6.2 beta 1

Yesterday we released a new beta of OmniDazzle 1.0.1, and today we released new betas of OmniPlan 1.0, OmniOutliner 3.6.1, and OmniWeb 5.5.  So if you're a user of any of these products, you might want to check out the latest versions!  There are links to all of these at www.omnigroup.com, or you can go directly to the beta of your choice using one of these links:

• OmniDazzle 1.0.1 beta 1
• OmniPlan 1.0 beta 6
• OmniOutliner 3.6.1 beta 3
• OmniWeb 5.5 beta 4

Enjoy!

Are you a productivity geek?

No, it's okay. You're among friends. This is a safe place. We're….we're all geeks here.

Well, some of us are geeks for American Idol, and frankly, that's far more embarrassing than being a productivity geek. I mean, not that I'm talking about myself. At all.

(CHRIS “BALD ROCKER GUY” DAUGHTRY RULEZ! WOO!)

(Ahem.)

Productivity geeks are into efficiency, and effectiveness, and other words that begin with “E”. (Like embolism, which is what happens to them if you start rambling about cheesy television shows and using long, tortured parentheticals!) If you're a productivity geek, you probably greatly enjoy colorful charts, to-do lists, and Quicksilver.

And maybe also cellphone/PDA gadgets. OH ADMIT IT.

Anyway, we just released an update to OmniOutliner which should be of interest to geeks and non-geeks alike. Version 3.6 has gone public and we recommend downloading it so you get all the fixes and improvements and general grooviness. It's free, of course, if you own OmniOutliner 3.x or OmniOutliner Professional 3.x, and that includes all you hardware people who got Outliner as a big old fat freebie on your spanky new machine.

OmniOutliner 3.6 Professional provides a little something extra, though, which all productivity geeks should check out: the new version works even better with Kinkless kGTD.

What is Kinkless kGTD, you ask (or for the purposes of this smooth-as-silk segue, I will pretend you ask)? Well, kGTD is a free set of AppleScripts produced by Ethan Schoonover that works with OmniOutliner Professional to create a framework for implementing David Allen's Getting Things Done® task-management methodology.

Whew. That was a mouthful. I hate using words like “methodology”, it makes me feel itchy.

Productivity Geek Extraordinaire Merlin Mann of 43Folders wrote this about kGTD and OmniOutliner: “By combining the stupendous OmniOutliner Pro with a bit of Applescript and pixie dust, KGTD provides a sensible way to manage Projects and Next Actions in one very clever little document. For those of you not already using and loving OO, this is a beautiful chance to see it in action.”

Makes you want to check it out, doesn't it? Hmmmm? *elbow nudge*

Well, you certainly can. You can read more about Kinkless kGTD here. You can grab the new version of OmniOutliner here. You can review the release notes here. You can even read our official press release about 3.6 here (130% less hyperbole!). And you can see an adorable hedgehog here.

Thanks for checking in at the Omni blog, where the news is always…um…presented in a serif typeface.

Let me tell you, it's not always easy being a non-technical person in an office of engineers. It's like bumbling your way through a foreign country where everyone knows the native tongue except you.

Engineer: “You'll need to use an ssh tunnel to access that.”

Me: “Okay. So are we talking an actual, physical tunnel here, or…?”

Engineer: “....”

I'm a n00b, what can I say. I'm intimidated by the Terminal (gah, the name alone: terminal!), acronyms befuddle me (TCP? VPN? what?), and AppleScript may as well be that African click language for all of my (in)ability to grasp its vernacular.

On the plus side, I like to think I can provide the lowest-denominator usability cases for our software. Sure, most of our applications can do complex operations and have all kinds of advanced settings, but hey–*I* can use them. Me, the mouthbreather who once clicked an emailed document screenshot…not once, not twice, but three times in a row, each time cursing the software's inability to perform.

The point of this post is actually not to convince you of the amount of oxygen whistling merrily through my skull, but to share some everyday, real life uses of our software in the hopes you'll do the same.

I use OmniOutliner to keep a running tally of household items I need to buy (on my list right now: “Spot Magic” carpet cleaner. Stupid cat), to draft writing projects, to keep track of who got what over the holidays (thus reducing the chance of gifting Relative So-and-So with yet another singing bass fish) (not that I would ever purchase such a corny novelty item), to plan vacation-related to-do items, and to store random bits of research I want to follow up on later.

I use OmniWeb's Workspaces feature to rattle through the giant list of blogs I visit daily; Shortcuts to quickly jump to IMDB, All Recipes, and Weather.com; and site-specific preferences to de-lamify sites with great content but obnoxious presentation.

Now with OmniGraffle, I don't typically spend a lot of time making complicated charts with all kinds of links and Bezier-drawn shapes and tables and whatnot (although I would be remiss in my Marketing Weasel duty if I did not point out that Graffle can obviously do all of those things), but I did make some downright spiffy holiday cards with OmniGraffle, and I'm currently using it to lay out a tile design for a bathroom remodel. And I made a process document for dealing with my eight-month-old son if he wakes up at night. Oh, you think I'm kidding?

Okay, quid pro quo time. If you're inclined, we'd love to see how you're using our apps in your day to day life, be they geeky tech examples that I'll have to have someone explain to me in monosyllabic terms, or otherwise. Hit the Say It! (Don't Spray It!) button and let us know.

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