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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
It's been another crazy busy month here at Omni! In the last four weeks, we've celebrated Thanksgiving and somehow survived Seattle's snow, we've started private beta testing of OmniPlan 2 and shipped updates to OmniFocus and OmniWeb for Mac. Oh, and that's not counting the 13 app releases we've submitted to the App Store this month: 2 iPhone updates, 4 iPad updates, and 7 "new" Mac apps (OmniFocus, OmniGraffle Standard and Pro, OmniOutliner Standard and Pro, OmniGraphSketcher, and OmniOutliner).
"OK," I hear some of you asking, "15 app releases this month? That's great and all, but really I only care about one release: where is OmniOutliner for iPad?"
Well, given that we're at the end of November and we have yet to reach beta, I think I can predict with confidence that OmniOutliner for iPad won't be shipping this year. We did finally come up with a design that makes us all reasonably happy on paper, but we're still busy implementing that design in code—after which we'll be running it through its paces to make sure it works as well on an actual device as it does in our imaginations.
(Not that our engineering team has been idle while all this design work has been going on. They've been busy working on all the nuts and bolts which make up the unique functionality offered in OmniOutliner!)
For those who prefer pictures, here's an updated graphic:
"You're really going to sell your apps through the Mac App Store?" I hear others asking. "What about all those questions and challenges you mentioned in your last blog post? How will you handle upgrade pricing and volume discounts, for example?"
We've decided the best way to solve those problems is to recognize that the Mac App Store isn't an exclusive distribution channel, so it doesn't need to solve every problem. We will continue to sell our apps through our own website (in addition to the App Store), where we can continue to offer discounts for upgrades, bundles, and volume purchases. We still think the Mac App Store will be the most convenient way to purchase apps for the average consumer, but those who prefer more flexible terms and options will be able to continue to purchase and install apps directly from us.
"Hey, wait, those weren't my questions at all!"
Hmm, um, OK, sorry, my magic 8-ball palantír must be broken! 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).
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).
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).
A week and a half ago, I announced that we were planning to bring all five of our productivity apps to iPad. So much has happened in the short period of time since then that it feels like we've been in some sort of time distortion field!
Let me skip straight to the good stuff and share some screenshots with you:
I should point out that the document icons in the document lists come from the QuickLook previews generated on the Mac, so they show features that aren't actually supported in the iPad app yet: for example, if you compare the OmniGraffle canvas screenshot with the corresponding icon in its document list, you'll see that OmniGraffle for iPad doesn't actually render text yet.
We don't even have a mechanism for creating new documents yet: both apps are just loading documents created on a Mac. But it's certainly progress!
Now, I mentioned two weeks ago that we were generally prioritizing iPad work over some of our Mac projects, but that some Mac projects—specifically, OmniOutliner 4 and OmniPlan 2—would take precedence over their iPad counterparts. In response to that plan, I received a lot of feedback that folks would like to see OmniOutliner for iPad sooner rather than later.
So we started thinking about how we could get started on OmniOutliner for iPad sooner. We really don't want to delay OmniOutliner 4, so we instead started thinking about how we could finish OmniOutliner 4 more quickly. We realized that if we scaled back some of the esoteric features which we'd planned for the Pro edition of version 4—cloning and multiple schemas—we could shave three months off its development schedule and get started on OmniOutliner for iPad that much sooner. Now, both of those features are still pretty interesting to us, and we've already laid the groundwork for supporting these in the underlying outlining engine—but we think bringing OmniOutliner on iPad is more important overall, so that's what we're going to do.
So I'm pleased to say that both OmniOutliner 4 and OmniOutliner for iPad will be coming three months sooner!
Oh, what's coming in OmniOutliner 4? We've rebuilt the engine inside of OmniOutliner, so among other things it will support text zooming, showing and hiding columns, "Smart Match" completion cells, searching across all column types, better link handling (no more unfindable tokens!), and (in the Pro edition) saved smart folders. (Also, say goodbye to the old Aqua drawer!)
Thanks for all your feedback on my last announcement, and I look forward to receiving any feedback you might have on this update!
One of the things we often struggle with as a company is deciding how much to talk about our future plans and our current work towards those plans. Our natural inclination is to be open about what we're doing, but there are several problems with talking about future plans:
- Our plans can and will change, upsetting customers who were making their own plans based on our original plan.
- Our plans might interfere with current sales, as customers stop buying OmniGraffle 8 in anticipation of the future release of OmniGraffle 9.
- We might get accused of promoting vaporware, as when we started talking about OmniFocus.
But there are also problems with not talking about our future plans, as it leaves people wondering what direction we're going and whether they'd like to be going that direction too. So, given the exciting event of this week, I think it's appropriate for us to share some of our plans with you now…
Remember how Macintosh was intended to be the computer “for the rest of us”? That's what we feel Apple's iPad is: the best computing device for most of the things people use computers for. (Or, as Apple puts it, “the best way to experience the web, email, and photos.”) It's the computer people can sit down and start using immediately, without training, whether they're 2 or 92.
We're really excited about Apple's iPad, and we want to make all of our products available for it as soon as we can. Yes, we already had a big year planned for 2010, with several long-anticipated major product releases—but we think iPad is really important: important enough to spend some time juggling our plans to figure out how we can introduce five new iPad apps.
Yes. Five. We want to bring all five of our productivity apps to iPad: OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, OmniPlan, OmniFocus, and OmniGraphSketcher.
This is a big undertaking, and we can't do it all at once. We started working on iPad adaptations of OmniGraffle and OmniFocus as soon as the SDK was made available Wednesday afternoon, and we're hoping to get started with OmniGraphSketcher for iPad within the next few weeks.
OmniPlan for iPad will be a little further behind, simply because the OmniPlan development team is on the home stretch of their two-year OmniPlan 2 development cycle, and we'd like to get that out the door before bringing OmniPlan to another platform.
Similarly, the OmniOutliner team is also heavily into a major development cycle—one which affects not only the next major release of OmniOutliner, version 4, but also the upcoming major releases of both OmniFocus and OmniPlan—so that team is booked up for at least the next several months. But while it won't be on iPad on day one, OmniOutliner is where all of our projects start and we think it will be a great fit for iPad, so we plan to adapt it as soon as possible.
What does this mean for our non-iPad apps? Well, for the apps we're bringing to iPad immediately there will be a bit of a delay in their next major Mac release cycle: for example, while we've already done a fair bit of work on OmniGraffle 6 for Mac, we're going to put that work on hold while we work on the iPad adaptation. Not that we don't think OmniGraffle 6 is important or exciting, but we think OmniGraffle for iPad is even more important. For the other apps, OmniPlan 2 and OmniOutliner 4, we're hoping for little or no delay in our upcoming releases, but there's likely to be a bit of a pause immediately afterwards as the teams shift gears and start working on bringing those apps to iPad as well.
So, that's our current plan. As I said in my introduction, our plans do change over time—obviously, they've changed quite a bit just this week!—so please don't rely on things happening according to today's particular snapshot of those plans. But I hope that this snapshot at least gives you a sense of what we're doing and why (and perhaps even an idea of when), so you can decide whether we're going in a direction you're interested in. Either way, I hope you'll let us know!
Thanks for your time!
