The Omni Group

BIG NEWS OVER HERE PEOPLE. After over 500 sneaky peek releases, which so many of you have been kind enough to give us feedback on, we are finally drawing the OmniFocus early release cycle to a close, with a bright and shiny final release date in mind: January 8, 2008.

As Ken wrote in his message to the OmniFocus mailing list, “We could probably go on indefinitely in this state:  you continue to give us lots of great ideas for ways in which we could improve the software further, and it's hard to resist implementing a good idea when we hear it.”

For REAL. This whole process has taken a lot longer than we had initially guessed, partially because of all the amazing feedback we received along the way. Oh, the spirited conversations that OmniFocus has sparked as we've tweaked the way the application works, and that's just here in the office. I won't get into details, but take it from me: you do not want to use the term “bucket” around here for a while—lest you trigger a frothy-mouthed debate, liberal use of the Caps Lock key, and eventual frantic emailing back-and-forth of walrus images.

Anyway, we've decided not only to commit to a final ship date, but also offer you a special deal. From today until January 8, you can pre-purchase OmniFocus at its introductory rate of $39.95. Once the final version ships, OmniFocus will sell for $79.95—so buy now, and save 50%.

But Omni, you might be thinking. What will I actually get if I buy it now? This sounds like one of those BS marketing schemes where if I buy in the next hour I'll also get a set of steak knives.

Ha ha! Come on, you know us better than that! We would never give you steak knives, because then you might use them to stab us.

If you buy now, you'll get a license that will work in the final version of the software. We'll send you an email when the final version ships, so you'll know exactly when it becomes available.

In the meantime, you can continue to use the beta version, which we're opening up to the general public today. While the betas will still be expiring (so you're encouraged to download more recent versions and not be stuck with bugs we may have fixed), you can easily set your OmniFocus preferences to automatically grab the most recent builds.

Also, if you are an OmniOutliner Professional license owner, you get an additional 25% discount on top of the current introductory pricing. Quantity discounts, educational, and family pricing are all available on our online store.

Thank you for helping us make OmniFocus such a great piece of software, and thank you for your patience during our development cycle.

And now, the relevant links:

• Learn more about OmniFocus and download the beta
• Updated OmniFocus video overview (15 min.) High-Definition (180MB)  iPhone (50MB)
• Pre-order Omnifocus in our online store