OmniOutliner 4 Test is ready

The Blog

by Derek R. on March 21, 2013

Another round of private (but just about public) testing!

In the past year we’ve written a bit about both 2013 and OmniOutliner 4; now we’re ready to let you see the next generation.

OmniOutliner 4 screenshot

Who?

We’d like anyone who uses OmniOutliner on most days to give it a go. Have a particular template or document you live out of? Try your workflows in OmniOutliner 4 and let us know if bugs happen. Real-world information here is extremely critical to a great public release of v4.

It’s important to note that OmniOutliner 4 has been completely rewritten and requires Mountain Lion (10.8).

If you’re in and have the time, sign up for the private OmniOutliner Test. We’re sending out the first round of invitations…

When?

Right now! Well, shortly after you sign up anyway. We’d like to get tens to hundreds of thousands of private testing hours before starting a “Hey stranger, come download this app” public test.

If you emailed us on your own accord in the past few months, you should have already received your invitation to test.

Is there anything missing?

Not missing, but possibly buggy! In February we finished adding the bulk of support for AppleScript (rewritten!) and printing (rewritten!), and you’ll see audio recording show up soon, too.

And the final version?

We’ll know when we’re ready after hearing from you. We want OmniOutliner 4 to be just as stable as OmniOutliner 3, and a good group of private testing with a lot of unique usage helps a great amount. Sign up, give it a go, and let us know what you find!

Comments

I’m hoping that the final version will support 10.7. Will it?

Matt

03.21.13 10:58 AM

I can’t wait ;-)

Pawel

03.21.13 11:49 AM

Can’t wait to get my hands on it!

Rob West

03.21.13 12:18 PM

Looking forward to giving it a go.

Steve Dobkins

03.21.13 3:09 PM

Will it do calculations from formulas, for example inserted value/119*19 to calculate German VAT?

Bernd

03.21.13 6:24 PM

I have to admit, as a Seattleite, I’m fascinated by the content of that screenshot.

What is it? A checklist of hikes someone wants to do in the area?

Paul L

03.21.13 8:30 PM

Never mind. Read the title - Duh!

WANT :)

Paul L

03.21.13 10:02 PM

What’s so great in OO4 that justifies to lock out 10.7 users?

Bernhard

03.22.13 4:13 AM

@Matt. I doubt OO4 will support OS X 10.7. There’s a lot of code that got changed. For the price of OO4 you could easily upgrade your OS a couple of times…
;-)

Is there a forum the testers could post to? There used to be one for the betas of OF 1 (years ago). I think testers could easily see when someone else had the same “quirk”.

Thomas

Thomas Böttiger

03.22.13 8:00 AM

Team Member

@Matt, @Bernhard: Older versions of the operating system have bugs in the frameworks which affect constraint-based view layout, flipped coordinate systems, document coordination, sandboxing, and many other operating system features which OmniOutliner 4 is built on top of. (We reported many of those bugs in Lion, and Apple fixed them for Mountain Lion.) It may be possible to work around some of these issues in order to support older operating systems, but that can significantly slow down both development and testing. (And presumably we’ll also need to support 10.9 very soon!)

@Bernd: We’d love to add calculations from formulas, but they’re not in 4.0.

@Thomas: We’ll set up a forum for OmniOutliner 4 testers.

Ken Case

03.22.13 9:26 AM

@Ken: Thank you! Please consider adding calculations from formulas in a nearer future. ;-)
This is a feature request dating back to 2007 for OmniOutliner v3. I know OmniOutliner is not a spreadsheet application, but there are so many outlining purposes this feature would be very useful for.
Can’t wait to update OO3 and OF1, thanks for the great work!

Bernd

03.22.13 11:38 AM

I’m using the trial OmniOutliner 3 and may buy it but I don’t want to then have to pay again for the upgrade. Are you going to do something like you’re doing for OmniFocus 2 where people who buy OO3 after a certain date get OO4 for free?

Steven Murdoch

03.22.13 12:18 PM

Team Member

@Steven: Anyone who purchases OmniOutliner 3 now will receive a free upgrade to OmniOutliner 4.

Ken Case

03.22.13 12:24 PM

I upgrade to OmniOutliner 3 on February 27, 2013. Do I need to buy a upgrade to OmniOutliner 4 or will I receive a free version.

Joakim Margell

03.22.13 3:12 PM

Mac App Store purchasers beware: your free upgrade may not be a Mac App Store version, but an Omni store version.

Bill

03.23.13 10:29 AM

I’ve been an avid Omni-Outliner fan so long that I can’t even tell you which version I started with. I sometimes teach at a Senior Resort and I use Omni-Outliner to prepare all my lectures and handouts. The students in the classes have all become accustomed to downloading Outliner in order to get my handouts (those that are not Mac users have iPads and use the iPad version). I own both versions.

Some of the features I’d like to see or see better integration of are: DropBox, Evernote, and, iCloud.

I would also like to see more export formats and integration with Snag-It.

Being able to use my Fujitsu ScanSnap to pull documents into Omni-Outliner would be a dream come true.

Howard Dym

03.23.13 11:58 AM

It seems as if OmniOutliner 4 presents a bunch of welcome new features - beautifully designed, I’m sure - but no meaningful extension of the core functionality of an outliner.

Yes, there’s a new style system, zooming, hiding columns, better Spotlight support, etc., but can the outlines do things they cannot now do? I haven’t heard of any. No filtering, no cloning, no computations, etc. It seems as if OO4 outlines do pretty much what OO3 outlines did, but better. No small achievement, I’m sure, but after all the years we’ve waited for a version 4, it seems as if the new features are just better versions of the old features.

It’s as if you spent years re-modeling your house, and at the end of the process all you have is better plumbing and wiring, and cleaner windows - you’re left with the same number of rooms, all the same size as they were, and there’s nothing you can do now that you couldn’t do before.

Or am I missing something?

R. Barre

03.23.13 1:08 PM

One criticism I’ve seen of OO3 reads:

“OmniOutliner is not the application I would choose to collect information from other sources. The professional edition does include a clipping service, so that you can drop text from other applications into your working outline. This is a handy feature, but is not robust enough to make OmniOutliner a proficient data storage option.”

Although it’s not entirely clear to me what that reviewer meant by “not robust enough” or “proficient data storage option”, nevertheless I’m wondering whether the build-out on OO4 tried to address this criticism.

Stefan

03.24.13 10:46 AM

Hi,

Is there a list of new features anywhere? At present I am stuck with Lion so am unable to use the trial version.

Simon

Simon Knight

03.25.13 4:17 AM

Team Member

@R.Barre: As you listed in your post, there are a number of new features in version 4, including text zooming, which is by far the most frequent feature request we get. Showing/hiding columns is another popular use case that the app didn’t support before. Another example would be deciding whether images will appear inline or as an icon on an individual basis.

The app’s also much more compatible with OS features that didn’t exist when version 3 shipped, like Full-Screen mode and OS X’s built-in autocomplete feature. There are whole groups of folks that couldn’t use the app at all before who can now due to the improved accessibility support.

Based on the feedback we get, printing and presentation-related features are really important to a lot of outliner customers. It’s true that you could print in version 3, but between the printing and style system overhauls, it should be a lot easier to create attractive documents and to get on-paper results that match your expectations without the fiddling that version 3 sometimes required. Increased usability should count as a new feature, in other words…

We still have feature requests open on the items on your wishlist, and now that the app’s on a more modern foundation, they’re more achievable. I think you’d be surprised by where some of those requests fall on the most-asked-for list compared to the items did make it in, though. From the feedback we get, folks care a lot about how their documents look, and they print them quite frequently. :-)

@Stefan - it sounds like the person in question is looking for something like Evernote or DevonThink; they’re useful tools with some features similar to OmniOutliner, but I think they’re fundamentally trying to do a different job than OmniOutliner does. (Not really, in other words.)

@Simon Knight - I hope my answer to R. Barre is helpful. Tried to kill two birds with one stone. :-)

Brian

03.25.13 5:04 PM

Hi Brian,

Thanks so much for the detailed answer. I don’t underestimate how much work went into the re-design, or how important those changes were to a majority of users who wrote in feature requests. I, too welcome all those changes. It’s just that after so much time, I assumed we’d get increased functionality - in other words, the ability to do new things with an outline that we could not do before. I’m glad for all the new features of OO4, and truly hope we’ll get the various versions of extended functionality that we’ve been talking about for so long.

Oh, one other thing: we still cannot re-size an image inserted into an outline. This is something that Circus Ponies Notebook, and quite a few other apps, have been able to do for years. I’m sure OmniGroup can figure out how to do this, and I can’t imagine it wouldn’t be a very welcome addition.

Thanks again for your quick response.

R. Barre

03.26.13 6:32 PM

@Thomas, pardon me for jumping in about the 10.7 comment above - its not always possible to just upgrade the OS. For example, I spent huge $$$ on a Mac Pro in 2008, and Apple no longer support it - ML will not install on it, so its “stuck” on 10.7.

IMHO, the day Apple started aggressively obsoleting hardware support in new releases, was also the day that also put paid to everyone just staying current with O/S releases like they used to. Before this new “obsoleting” thing, I certainly would have agreed with you.

frank

03.28.13 10:55 AM

Will OO4 be able to open MORE 3.1 files? (just as OO3 was able to do)

Michael

03.28.13 1:37 PM

Will there be an iPhone compatible version for OO4 please?

It would be brilliant to be able to create checklists - particularly templates for recurring tasks / lists - on the desktop and then use them on the iPhone.

Even if there was a limited set of features for transferable files (documents) that could be used on the iPhone.

Nested checklists created on the desktop, to be checked off on the iPhone… hmmm, yes, please…

Andrew

03.28.13 8:49 PM

Will OO3 be able to open OO4 files? And will OO3 be able to open OO4 files via OmniPresence? I still use an old iMac (Late 2006) which maxed out with 10.7—thus I won’t be able to install OO4 on that machine. I’ve also a recent iMac (Late 2012), so I’d like to use OO4 on the new machine—it would be cool to sync OO files between versions 4 and 3 across OmniPresence. :-)

Can’t wait to test OO4!

Stefan

03.30.13 3:05 PM

Sign me up for the testing please ...........

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