The Omni Group

View the full release notes then download it!

View the full release notes then download it!

View the full release notes then download it!

View the full release notes then download it!

View the full release notes then download it!

Welcome to the third, and for this week anyway, final installment of “You Ask, We Answer!”. Brought to you by Diet Coke and the letter Q.

(Q for Qwality!)

Ayjay asked, many Mac developers have moved away from the use of drawers (especially now that Apple has taken them away from Mail) but you guys still feature drawers-a-plenty. What do you like about drawers? Have you thought about any other ways of implementing the functionality that drawers give you?

Ooh, good question. I had to call in the troops for help on this one, since my opinions on drawers are mainly limited to the kind you put your socks in. Ken, our CEO, and Bill, our UI Lead, put their heads together to answer you:

'We like drawers because they are a great place for content that belongs to the main window but doesn't necessarily need to be there all the time. They're great for “source lists”, from which you can choose what to view in the main window, like OmniGraffle's canvases or OmniWeb's tabs. Perhaps best of all, unlike a sidebar, you can show, hide, or resize a drawer all day long without affecting the dimensions or layout of the main content. And in Omni apps, you can move the drawer to whichever side of the window you prefer by Option-clicking the drawer button in the toolbar.

The problem with drawers, of course, is that the things just don't look modern. While the rest of Mac OS X interface was getting the sleek plastic or metal treatment, drawers are still as pinstripey, space-wastey, and noisy as they were the day they were introduced. Unless we want to cobble together and maintain some sort of custom fake drawer ourselves (or—gasp!—Apple actually updates drawers' appearance), we're going to have to get away from drawers eventually.

In meetings for our new products, we've talked about how to deal with this problem, and we think we may have come up with a good hybrid of the useful drawer and the sleek sidebar. You may end up seeing the first incarnation of it in OmniFocus, if we can do it right.'

Spencer says, I have had no luck at all with storing OmniGraffle documents in Subverson.  The icon seems to contain an illegal character or something.

Here's the response from our OmniGraffle tech support/product manager NINJA EXTRAORDINAIRE:

'This is likely due to OmniGraffle saving the files out as packages, which other file systems can have difficulty dealing with.

OmniGraffle will automatically save a file out to a package if an image or external graphic is present in the document; there is a hidden preference to avoid this behavior that can be enabled from the command line. To get OmniGraffle to always save as a “flat” file (which will have no problems on other filesystems), open up Terminal.app and paste this in:

defaults write com.omnigroup.OmniGraffle PrivateGraffleFlatFile 0

Afterwards, new documents should always save as a monolithic file, you may have to perform a “Save As” for existing documents to convert them.'

Man, I'm loving this whole 'fob off the hard questions on other Omni employees' gig. What else have you got, commenters? Bring. It. On! *spirit hands*

Matt wants to know, Do you guys plan on fixing RSS anytime soon? Its a sometimes it work, sometimes it doesn't work symptom. Usually I have to relaunch OmniWeb to get it to recheck RSS feeds- it doesn't do it by itself even though I have it set to recheck the feeds every hour.

Dang, this one's less fun to answer. Turns out we've seen this issue and we're able to reproduce it. It's a bug that we're hoping to fix in an upcoming release, after the 5.5.1 update. Sorry about that!

Conor asks, Can you tell me if OmniFocus will liason with OmniPlan so that you can plan projects in OmniPlan and then download your personal tasks into OmniFocus? Also, are there any plans to allow Wintel users to edit OmniPlan? I work in a mixed-platform office and, while I do most of the project planning on my mac, it would be nice to enable other employees to check off tasks, etc.

We would love for OmniFocus and OmniPlan to work together that way, but I think it's safe to say that they won't for OmniFocus 1.0. We're trying to limit the scope to what we can actually get out the door in a (hopefully) reasonable amount of time, but it's definitely on the plate for future consideration.

As for Wintel users…well, we likely won't ever have a cross-platform version of OmniPlan, but you can use OmniPlan to export to .mpx, .mpp, and MSPDI .xml for sharing with Microsoft Project and other project management applications. You can also export to a .csv file for import into Excel, and if people just need to see the data, not update it, you can export the Gantt, outline or both into several different image formats (PDF, PNG, TIFF, JPEG). And! You can export to html – either a single table of tasks, or a mini-website with a Gantt chart, tables, and calendar files that can be imported into iCal, Outlook or other calendaring apps.

Thanks for all your questions, folks, and if I didn't get to yours this week, my apologies. Please stay tuned for an Exciting Announcement (note: your excitement may vary) about OmniWeb I will be posting later today. Same blog time, same blog channel.

Please read the release notes because there have been a lot of changes.

Download OmniPlan beta 8

Release Notes:

• New Features

  • Tasks have a priority setting which assists in leveling
  • Behavior of the enter key is now user configurable
  • Notes from OmniPlan can now be exported to iCal and included in HTML exports
  • Mini-Manual now available through the Help menu
  • The Show Overview command in the View menu provides an abstract view of all top-level tasks and groups in the project
  • Showing dates on milestones in the Gantt chart is now a separate View Options setting from showing assigned resources on tasks
  • When you drag tasks, they now snap to time units based on the zoom level
  • Duration and Effort totals added to the list of things that appear when left clicking at the bottom of the main window

• Major Fixes

  • Importing
    • We've fixed a number of issues related to importing and exporting MS Project files.  While we have fixed some problems, we know we still have more work to do, so please keep sending us bug reports!

  • Leveling
    • New leveling algorithm

      • The new leveling algorithm is faster, produces fewer hangs and behaves more predictably.
      • The details are:
        1. Order tasks by priority then by position in the outline
        2. From lowest priority up, position any tasks with absolute end limits (meaning they are locked or have an end constraint or are a prerequisite to another task which is locked or has an end constraint) as _late_ as it is possible for them to fit, so as to reserve worst-case space.
        3. From highest priority down, position tasks as early as allowable and will fit. This includes all the tasks in step 2 as well, which may be moved earlier because of this. If any tasks fail to fit at all, save them for later.
        4. With only remaining 'failed' tasks, from highest priority down, perform the same operation as in step 3. Some may fit now because a lower priority task with a reserved position in step 2 may have moved during its part of step 3. While any tasks are able to be positioned, repeat step 4 again with remaining failed tasks.

  • Calendar

    • Moving time blocks in the work schedule no longer misbehaves
    • Fixed crash when pushing arrow keys in Calendar Mode
    • Modifying time blocks no longer causes them to disappear

  • AppleScript Dates
    • The OmniPlan AppleScript library now handles NSDates correctly

  • Inspecting Multiple Tasks
    • It is now possible to edit multiple tasks at the same time

  • HTML Templates

    • Standardized and cleaned up the HTML in exported projects
    • Exporting resource information is more configurable
    • CSS for our exported HTML has been moved to a separate file
    • HTML exports are more compatible with Firefox and IE

  • Overhauled print options
  • OmniPlan's print settings now accept 2-digit months

• Minor Fixes

  • Option-clicking a group in the Gantt view will now expand all hidden children
  • Resources no longer disappear from calendar view if you make the window tiny and resize it up again
  • A group's completion percentage now updates immediately when adjusting a subtask
  • Grouping tasks will now renumber properly
  • Assignment pane of the Task inspector now shows all resources
  • Users can now convert between task, group, and milestone from the contextual/action menu

Download OmniPlan

I have to say, I sort of hate it when one of our apps is in public beta for more than a few weeks. It starts to lose that new-car smell, you know? People ask when the release date is scheduled for, and we have to give elaborate shrugs in response. As Omni's official marketing weasel, the Elaborate Shrug is my least favorite reply to draw on. I much prefer the Sarcastic Eye Roll (as in, “When are you going to offer a PC version?” *eye roll*).

We had hoped to be announcing the final release of OmniPlan by now, but, well, people are still helping us find things to be fixed. Sometimes a hearty beta period just can't be avoided, because you guys don't just find bugs, you provide the kind of feedback that's necessary for us to come up with the best UI solutions and feature compromise.

The Omni Group is made up of a lot of perfectionists, honestly. The process of putting the metaphorical fork in the app because like it or not, at some point we've got to declare it D-U-N isn't easy.

So, I think your mission is clear: stop reporting bugs with OmniPlan.

Oh, I'm just kidding. Please, put down the stones.

Actually, we really need your input, so please keep sending it our way. Especially if you encounter problems using MS Project with OmniPlan, either by opening Project files into Plan or vice versa – let us know about those. The Project stuff is definitely one of our current bugaboos, and more examples are a good thing.

Speaking of examples! (Ah, yet another seamless, buttery segue.) I have a sample OmniPlan document for you, based on a few requests we've had. This one provides an example of dependencies, which are tasks that depend on other tasks. For instance, you might use a dependency for calling out that “Design UI” is a prerequisite of “Freeze UI”, or that “Eat Delicious Chocolate Cupcake” is dependent on both “Bake Delicious Chocolate Cupcake” and “Buy Massive Bag of Flour”. And so on.

Mmmmm. Cupcakes.

Anyway, the document covers the basic concepts of dependencies and different types you can have (and how to create them). If you have some thoughts on other sample documents you'd like to see for OmniPlan, talk to us!

Click for a link to the .zip file:

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