iPad or Bust: 3 down, 2 to go!

The Blog

by Ken Case on September 16, 2010

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).

Comments

Regarding OmniOutliner, are you going to be providing some sort of automatic syncing ability like OmniFocus? Or will we have to manually jump through hoops (like OmniGraffle) of dragging our documents to the iPad whenever we want to make a change there, and then dragging them back to our Mac whenever we want to make a change on our Mac? That’s just such a pain in the butt, because it doesn’t enable us to seamlessly work on our documents from all devices… we always have to be manually alert & aware of where our latest revision lives, and we always have to be manually dragging things around back-and-forth constantly. Unless OmniOutliner for iPad could access our files on our Dropbox, in which case Dropbox could worry about the syncing. (Although I don’t know if Dropbox even works with OmniOutliner files.) In any case, could you please provide some clarity on how this is going to work, and how we can keep our workflow sane & in sync at all times? Thanks!

Scott Rose

09.16.10 11:12 PM

Great to hear about Oo and Op - especially the Mac part. Call me conservative, but although I can see things that make life easier on an iPad, I am still logging my MacBook Pro around for a job and a living.
Tools like OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, OmniFocus and OmniPlan have made me much more efficient. And since I need them for the “hard work” I am looking forward to the improvements and refinements and the new possibilities in the Mac apps.

Thomas Böttiger

09.17.10 12:18 AM

Thanks for the update. Do you plan to bring OmniOutliner to the iPhone as well as the iPad?

Glenn Proctor

09.17.10 1:01 AM

Two requests:

(1) Dropbox for opening and saving OO files. (Yes, it works).

(2) Use the VGA out on iPad to display any PDFs, JPEGs, Quicktime files while keeping the outline displayed on the iPad screen.

Number two is paramount to educators/teachers, or anyone else, who wishes to view an outline of their notes while displaying files to the audience.

Pete

09.17.10 9:04 AM

Great News. Now I can stop checking this blog everyday and hold tight till at least sometime after 4.2. thanks Ken.

Witz

09.17.10 12:16 PM

I very much appreciate the update and the honesty. It is also nice to see a software company taking the time to get the design right rather than rushing junk to market. However I must admit to being pretty disappointed. I have used OmniOutliner heavily for years, taking notes at meetings, planning class lectures and so on. As my workflow has been modified to include the iPad more and more I’m finding it inconvenient to switch between OmniOutliner on the computer and some other application on the iPad. I’m afraid this means I’ll have to abandon OO on the Mac, at least for a while. :-(

No criticism intended. As Witz said at least I can stop checking the blog every day :-)

Phil

09.17.10 1:50 PM

I use Evernote as my file system, some integration there would be great.

Manually moving files back and forth is a hassle.

Børge Svingen

09.17.10 5:24 PM

Scott - well said - OmniOutline sync is a huge value for me. Cloud sync is perfection. It’s a huge boost to productivity and keeping us all sane. It also means that i actually use both versions of the app, rather than constraining myself to just one platform to avoid the ‘out of sync’ issue.
Must say I am really looking forward to OmniOutliner for the iPad. It will get genuine every-day use.

Giles

09.18.10 1:42 AM

Our company makes a lot of use of Omni stuff - and we love them. I’m hoping to see collaborative support in all Omni Apps - Mac/iPhone/iPad.

Keep up the great work!

Wayne

Wayne

09.18.10 9:48 PM

good..
thanks

????

09.20.10 3:34 AM

...awaiting OF iPad 1.1….

Brandon Lewis

09.20.10 8:17 AM

Ken, I’m less impressed by others here about the timing of your announcement. Shortly after the shipping of OF for iPad, just a couple of months ago, you promised OO for iPad by “end of summer”.

It feels disingenuous to wait until the end of summer to announce that the product will in fact ship end of Q4. You may have deferred your loyal customers from moving to other products in the meantime, but you’ve lost all-important trust and credibility with your loyal customers. It’s one thing to for software development to take longer than originally estimated, but quite another to knowingly mislead your customers.

I love Omni Group products and have bought many copies of them for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. But I will no longer be factoring your estimated ship dates into my buying plans. We just purchased a group license for CarbonFin because that company’s product is available and they have a record of honesty about ship dates.

Nick G

09.21.10 12:08 AM

Team Member

Nick, I’m sorry we didn’t have more frequent status updates on OmniOutliner over the summer.

If you’ve found another outliner for iPad which works well for you today, that’s wonderful! We want you to find the best solution for you and your team, whether or not that product is the one we’re working on.

Starting with my very first iPad or Bust! post, I’ve tried to be very clear that my statements are not intended to promise anything: I’m simply giving everyone a snapshot into our current plans and projects—which, as I said from the start, can and will change over time. I’ve repeatedly asked people not to rely on those plans for that very reason.

For most of the last 8 months I’ve been in heads-down mode, working first on OmniGraffle for iPad, then on OmniFocus for iPad/iPhone/Mac. Once I shipped all of those, I realized that the stars had aligned and that I had my first opportunity of the year for a vacation—so I took it. Once I returned from that vacation two weeks ago, I finally had time to pay attention to the larger picture again and started surveying the status of all of our other projects to see where each was at. As soon as I finished that survey I posted this update, so that everyone here would have the latest projection as soon as we did.

I’m sorry if sharing our plans in advance led to any confusion which delayed your purchase of another product. Our intent was simply to let you know where we’re headed, not to discourage you from finding something else that works for you!

Ken Case

09.21.10 1:18 AM

Team Member

Scott (and others interested in cloud syncing), yes, we’d definitely like our document-based iPad apps to be able to synchronize documents through the cloud similar to the way OmniFocus syncs tasks. Hopefully that’s something we’ll solve for OmniGraffle and OmniGraphSketcher by the time OmniOutliner ships, in which case OmniOutliner can just leverage that same code. But if it’s not ready at launch time, we’re not going to hold back OmniOutliner to wait for that: we’ll just add syncing support in a free update. (The feature will be ready just as soon as it would be otherwise, but people who don’t require that feature won’t have to wait for it.)

Glenn, writing the iPad app will make it somewhat easier to write an iPhone app, but the hard part is UX design and our iPad designs won’t fit on an iPhone. So, no, we don’t have any plans to bring OmniOutliner to the iPhone yet—we already have more than enough on our plates!—but we may consider it once we’ve finished all the work we’re already committed to doing.

Ken Case

09.21.10 1:35 AM

all of this is great… BUT WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO MAKE A PC APP? (and android)
no, come on, really we need omnifocus on PC… and evernote integration, and dropbox, wualla, megaupload, yousendit and box.net… (yes dropbox is not the only player around)

there are so many players around… only the one that can be everywhere will win…-> look at evernote! sync everywhere makes you the king… so why adapting each app on the ipad, when ALL you apps should be everywhere in a vertical way…

if you guys focus on omnifocus, do the whole segement for omnifocus, then go to another software… the ipad is a great devices, but those who are using it are using a lot more devices to work… don’t expect your users to be only Apple’s fan… I have an Ipad, nexus one, mac at work, pcs at home, and using a lot of pcs in other offices or airport… you can’t expect me to be loyal to your products if they are not available everywhere, sorry to bring the evernote example again, but I’m a happy customer of them because I only use their products everywhere…the Ipad is a great computer…but not my only computer… I will switch to the company that can provide me the experience I love everywhere, and not just only on 1 phone and 2 computers type, the world is bigger than that…

Thierry BEZIER

09.21.10 8:29 PM

Ditto what Pete said for Dropbox integration for OmniGraffle, etc. Many iPad apps have Dropbox support - DocsToGo, Office2, 1Password, numerous note taker apps, etc. Once you’ve done Dropbox, shouldn’t be a stretch to do any other similar integration (Box.net, Mozy, SpiderOak, iFolder, AWS S3, Evernote, etc.)

Only one app I use, in the same league as Omni apps, doesn’t have Dropbox support yet: Papers (mekentosj.com). And I am waiting and hoping they’ll come through on that feature as they usually do.

Something like DropBox on OG for iPad is critical, since in my particular case most of my authoring will always be done at the computer (I use two Macs - one desktop, one laptop, 1 iPhone, 1 iPad, and an Android device - my head is going to explode). The iPad will be presenting, reviewing, doing adjustments, etc and re-saving. Right now it’s very hard to get OG for iPad into any kind of workflow without having a good way to exchange files.

... finally as a next project I think you folks should work on a lite version of OmniGraffle for the web. Google is already starting to encroach on that, with their Drawing tool in Google Docs. You have something special with OG and it would be a big plus if people who use OG today could someday collaborate on diagrams with anyone who has a modern web browser. It can be done—probably not as featured or elegant as a rich client, but “good enough” by Omni standards should be better than what Google is going to do in that class of application.

Same for OmniPlan and OmniOutliner.

Cheers

Dylan Carlson

09.21.10 8:45 PM

Please consider making at least an iPhone viewer (with cloud syncing) as soon as cloud syncing works for the iPad version. I need to be able to read/search my outlines when I am away from my iPad/Mac (even if I can’t update them).

Looking forward to the iPad version. Cheers

Oddmund

09.22.10 6:08 AM

@Oddmund:

One thing you can do right now is to “print” a copy of your outlines to PDF and stash them in your Dropbox folder so you can read them on your iPhone (or iPad) with the Dropbox app. If you need to search, you can tap the button at the upper right to open the file in iBooks or GoodReader, both of which will give you search capabilities as well.

Bill

09.22.10 3:27 PM

@Thierry

I personnaly hope Omnigroup will not go to the Windows and Android area. I can understand it would be of some use for some people. But i remember that when OSX was still a baby (well son of NeXT), omni applications were and still are of a rare quality because they focus on the apple technologies only.

While i like evernote, i still consider it lack many features (ergonomy of the ipad version IMHO, lack of bold, underline and so on ipad / iphone ...) because they have too many platforms to manage.

I’m not sure omnifocus, omniplan, omnigraffle, omnioutliner would be so great on the mac (and iPad for some) if they had to maintain more than two platform (wich share some common approach and tech luckilly even if IOS and MacOSX are different beast).

But i may be wrong and, anyway, who am i to say what should be done :)

Anyway, thanks omni for your great apps on the mac and now iOS

Yann

09.23.10 2:56 AM

Guys,

There hasn’t been a point upgrade to OmniOutliner in over five years. I bought Omni Outliner in January 2005.

So, while you’re at it, please update the core application.

Looking forward to using it on iPad and hopefully iPhone. Already using OmniFocus on all Mac, iPad and iPhone.

-Hatef

Hatef Yamini

09.23.10 6:20 AM

@Hatef,

OmniOutliner has had a number of point updates over the last few years (3.0 though the current 3.9.5). What it hasn’t had is a major version update (to OmniOutliner 4). The only Omni app to receive a major version update in that time is OmniGraffle, but as you know, they’ve rolled out several new apps on various platforms.

They are busy at work on OO4, and you can read some discussion about the schedule and feature set at:

http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=15286

http://www.omnigroup.com/blog/entry/iPad_or_Bust_two_weeks_later

Bill

09.23.10 9:28 AM

Thanks so much, Ken, for the update on cloud syncing! Great news that you guys are already working on this! :) Hip hip hooray!

I’d like to add my voice to the chorus about Dropbox support. I love Dropbox and rely on Dropbox for so many different apps now. If you guys could support Dropbox, that would be INFINITELY AWESOME! :)

Scott Rose

09.24.10 6:45 PM

@Thierry BEZIER.

Um, dude, you have got to be kidding all of us. It would be MUCH EASIER and MORE BENEFICIAL and MORE PRODUCTIVE for you to switch to Mac and iPhone, then to try to get OmniFocus to support crappy substandard derivative flawed products such as PC’s and Androids. What a complete joke. Do you really think a company as good as The Omni Group would ever sink to such levels, the basement of lowest common denominators? Give us all a break. What you posted is a complete joke. Jesus.

Scott Rose

09.25.10 11:24 AM

And by “OmniFocus”, I meant “The Omni Group”.

Scott Rose

09.25.10 11:24 AM

Cloud syncing! Please! Dropbox is free as in beer!

Peter Keppel

09.27.10 4:58 PM

I’d like to put in a word for an iPhone version of OO, too. I have been using OO for a number of years, and find that the only major feature that is missing is cloning (maybe in OO4?). Now that I have an iPhone, I would really like to be able to sync between it and my Mac. (I hope to have an iPad someday, but am dragging my MacBook Pro around for the moment.)

Charles C. Hadley

09.28.10 7:44 AM

When OmniOutliner comes out for the iPad, will it support OmniOutliner Pro?

Sarah

09.28.10 1:18 PM

Like so many others, DropBox integration is critical. I want to be able to store files in my DropBox folder on my MacBook Pro and then open them, work on them, and save them back to DropBox on the iPad. That would get rid of all the file handling hassle. Still waiting for iWork to do the same. DocsToGo and quickOffice do it well there is no “exporting” or “save to DropBox”. You just save and it doesn’t create a duplicate that you have to remember to save back to the DropBox. Still can’t believe iWork doesn’t do that yet. I am anxiously awaiting the end of Q42010!

Ben MacKay

09.28.10 2:45 PM

While I love Omni products and I use them at home and on my iPad, at work I’m stuck in PC land. Could you find it in your hearts to enable me to send tasks from my PC to OnmiFocus either by mail or a web interface to OmniSync. It does not need to do anything fancy, just accept tasks into the inbox and sync it to the iPad and iPhone.

AlexE

10.05.10 4:54 AM

AlexE, I am in the same situation as you and such a solution would be really useful when I dont have Ipad around me at work.

Marc

10.06.10 7:36 AM

ditto on the PC support for OmniFocus, I have a genuine need for a PC and it would be great to be able to manage tasks on this platform as well as my iPad/iPhone.

Tim

10.06.10 8:38 AM

At least for OmniGraffle, the product is priced out of the market. Basic analysis with Micro-Economics will show you can increase sales and revenue with lowered price…

Joaquin Menchaca

10.14.10 10:46 AM

@Joaquin:

The current price tag does a pretty good job of dissuading potential customers who aren’t likely to put in the effort to learn how to use the app well. It isn’t in anyone’s best interest to have a large number of customers who are unhappy with the app or who don’t use it, or to have the support resources overwhelmed by help requests from users who couldn’t be bothered to know what they were buying. OmniGraffle is intended as a serious tool for serious users; if the price tag is too steep, if it isn’t worth the money to you, you may not be in the target audience, just as people who prefer to spend $299 for a crummy netbook aren’t necessarily the target audience for an iPad.

Bill

10.14.10 3:42 PM

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