The Omni Group

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: