It’s been almost one year since we shipped OmniOutliner for iPad. Every day since we shipped we’ve received feedback along the lines of “This looks great! But when will it automatically sync with OmniOutliner for Mac?”—and each time we reply back “We’re working on it!” But it’s been almost a year now, and I know you all must be wondering: Why is it taking so long to add automatic syncing to OmniOutliner?

To make documents with large embedded attachments more efficient, OmniOutliner 3 stores its documents as “file wrappers”, which behind the scenes are simply directories holding separate files which represent different parts of the document. (The outline itself is one file, and each attachment is its own separate file.) Unfortunately, most sync services don’t support syncing a directory as an atomic operation.

Wait, hold on, what does “atomic operation” mean? Well, in computer speak, an atomic operation is something that gets done all at once. In this case, we want all of the parts of the document to get synchronized to or from the cloud at the same time, otherwise different parts of the document might not be in sync with itself: it might be missing some attachments, or perhaps some of them will be out of date, or maybe there will be some extra attachments that shouldn’t be there.

In other words, when syncing OmniOutliner, it’s not just important to have all the parts eventually arrive on the other end; we want all of the parts of the document to show up on the other end at the very same time (and we want to know when they’ve all finished arriving) so that we know it’s safe to open and you won’t end up with a corrupt document.

One way to solve this syncing challenge is to change our document format—to stop storing OmniOutliner documents as directories behind the scenes. This change would make it much less efficient for attachments, but would also make it much more compatible with many file servers, email, web forms, source control systems, and so on. We can do that—but such a big change to the OmniOutliner file format won’t work with the currently shipping apps, and doesn’t really make sense to do before shipping OmniOutliner 4. So taking this route to solving the problem means for us to try to ship OmniOutliner 4 as soon as possible (which we’re certainly working very hard to do).

Another way to solve this problem is to help syncing solution providers (such as DropBox and iCloud) improve their support for atomic directory operations so we can sync using their solutions. The most promising option here by far is iCloud, since iCloud’s engineers explicitly do want to support syncing of file wrappers. We’ve had some of our most experienced developers spend much of the past year working on this approach—but much of that time was spent blazing new territory, and most issues we encountered weren’t within our control to fix because we don’t control the technology and servers. Fortunately, we think we’ve pushed through most of the critical issues and we’re hoping this approach will bear fruit soon.

Of course, if it takes too long to change our document format or to get atomic directory syncing working with other people’s cloud servers, another approach would be for us to add syncing support for our own cloud servers. We recently brought our Omni Sync Server out of beta, and we’re using it now to automatically sync OmniFocus and OmniPlan.

One way or another, we’re working very hard to bring automatic syncing to OmniOutliner as soon as possible: we know it’s absolutely critical for anyone who wants to use OmniOutliner on more than one device. We’re very sorry it’s taking so long!

As always, we welcome your feedback! Please feel free to leave a comment here or on our forums, or by sending me a message on twitter (where you’ll find me at @kcase).

File Under: iPad, OmniOutliner

278 fixes, to be exact! Get your release notes here.

It’s also identifiable by this brand new icon, following in the footsteps of seven new (Omni Group) icons before it.

Resource Load Sharing

One of the biggest requests for OmniPlan 2.1 has been the ability to manage multiple resources across multiple projects. With Resource Load Sharing, we’ve developed a great way to do that.

• Use our Sync Server or your server repository to publish and sync all of your projects.
• Assign an email address to each resource. (This is how OmniPlan keeps track of, say, two John Smiths.)
• Make sure “Subscribe to other projects’ resource loads” is checked in your Publishing & Subscriptions configuration.

And here’s a friendly video about exactly that:

Our Transmogrifier

One of the changes that we introduced in the first beta of 2.1 was a switch to a new Microsoft Project importer/exporter. Because of the Mac App Store’s restriction on optionally-installed software, we had to make our converter—the Transmogrifier, as we call it—a downloadable add-on. We decided the best option for everyone was to completely rewrite it.

In the final version of OmniPlan 2.1, it’s turned off by default. If you have the time to try it, please do. We’d love to get a wider swath of test files to really put it though its paces.

To enable the new importer/exporter, use the following hidden defaults (in Terminal):

defaults write com.omnigroup.OmniPlan2 UseNativeMSPFilters -bool true

For the Mac App Store version:

defaults write com.omnigroup.OmniPlan.MacAppStore UseNativeMSPFilters -bool true

If you’d like to go back to 2.0-style Microsoft Project support, replace true with false.

Use OmniPlan▸Check for Updates. If you don’t have OmniPlan installed, grab it here. The Mac App Store version will be available after approval.

File Under: Products, OmniPlan

About a year ago, we decided to bring a few of these to video. We sincerely hope you’ll find them as inspiring as we do. More stories are in the pipeline, and we’re always wanting to hear more.

This story is about Tim Stringer and OmniFocus. In 2008, Tim Stringer’s daily schedule went from busy and productive to monofocused: heal. He was able to pick up a new habit during the process, though, and the outcome was—and remains—a very good one.

The story

Tim wrote more about how he uses OmniFocus. He shares much of what he’s learned through his company, Technically Simple, as an OmniFocus coach.

We talked to Tim in beautiful Vancouver, BC. Thanks to MacFanatic—especially the founders, Jani and Genevieve—for use of their space.

File Under: Customer Stories, Products, OmniFocus

Some of our more diehard archivers, defer-ers, and On Hold enthusiasts might appreciate some of her advice in this area. OmniFocus folks that frequently find themselves full of dread at the prospect of delving into their ever-expanding list of projects, though, might consider moving her book to the top of their Amazon Wishlist.

Or heck, secede from the procrastination and grab an iBooks copy now, and consider another step in your “Self Improvement” project done!

Sure, it could be argued that adding another book to your library might be an ironic next action for those who wish to free themselves from feeling burdened by too much stuff, but what Discardia celebrates isn’t minimalism for mere minimalism’s sake, it’s about maximizing what adds value to your life by removing what isn’t helpful.

We recently spoke with Dinah about how she uses OmniFocus and she put it to us this way:

Overwhelm can be a big problem with any task management software, but it is especially a risk when following the GTD approach of getting everything out of your head and into a trusted system. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing—even a somewhat chaotic version of that is going to be better than keeping it all in your brain—but it does expose to us just how many expectations on ourselves we actually carry around.

My belief is that it’s okay to have hundreds of things you’d like to do; what will screw you up (and keep you from achieving many of them) is consciously or unconsciously living as though you must do them all. Limiting your canvas can boost your creativity and increase the chance of completion. The two features which make OmniFocus an intensely valuable tool in helping hold back a sense of overload are the review infrastructure and the ability to distinguish between active and on hold projects. You can dump everything in there, yet still keep most stuff out of your face on your day-to-day action lists while trusting that it will remind you to think about it again at appropriate, adjustable intervals.

And whether it’s today or the next time you sit down for a Review, taking the time to trim your database can have an equal effect to actually checking things off - clearing your plate is clearing your plate!

Remember that there’s a difference between finishing your fair share and biting off more than you can chew. As Dinah puts it in her book: “We all have pet projects, social commitments, goals for personal and professional growth, and hobbies to which we devote our time. We stroll past the buffet of life and load our plates. Unfortunately, we make a lot of trips back to that smorgasbord of options and, pretty soon, we are groaning under the load. Do you really like everything you picked up thinking it would be tasty? Can you really finish all that? Would doing so leave you feeling painfully over-stuffed?”

One way Dinah suggests kicking off un-cluttering a living space could easily be leveraged in OmniFocus as well: “Get yourself two boxes. Label the first box ‘Better Place’. Put in any items currently in your chosen space that belong somewhere else. Label the second box ‘Keep?’ and place into this box anything you’re not sure you want anymore.”

Go ahead, try it! Click the action button at the bottom of the OmniFocus for Mac sidebar, select “New Single Action List” twice, and label them accordingly. Now peruse your projects and drag anything into those two bins that isn’t making you feel empowered to accomplish more awesome actions. Then, redistribute the contents of ‘Better Place’ to more advantageous projects, and carefully consider what’s in ‘Keep?’ before placing them On Hold or putting the final nail in their respective coffins by marking them Dropped, and sending them to your Archive to rest in peace.

That’s one way to lighten up OmniFocus to support a more meaningful, less maniacal to do list. As an avid OmniFocus user—since the days it was Kinkless—Dinah definitely knows a thing or two about optimization. Discardia is (adequately) full of practical tips and encouraging guidance, concentrated into three core principles: Decide and Do, Quality over Quantity, and Perpetual Upgrade.

In the spirit of that last principle, consider adding the Discardia iCal calendar to help remind you when it’s a good time to ceremoniously cast off any excess baggage and enjoy more awesomeness.

File Under: Products, OmniFocus, Use cases

All three updates include the extremely useful and oft-requested feature of flexible weekly repeats. Set up an action to repeat every week on certain days: every weekday, every weekend, just Mondays, etc.

Previously, the best way to create a weekday-only or weekend-only repeating action was to create one action for each day, and set to repeat every 1 week. That method worked, but admittedly required a bit too much initial effort.

Set up a configuration with a few clicks or taps: on the Mac, open up the Inspector; on the iPhone and iPad, bring up the Action Details editor and tap the Dates column like usual. Choose the “every” repeat type, pick a few days, and done.

This makes things easier for many customers, and we’re very happy to have it available. We’d like to add more functionality for repeating actions in the future, too.

Finally, OmniFocus for Mac has a new icon, OmniFocus for iPad has been retina-ized, and we’ve fixed a few more bugs! For full release notes: Mac, iPad, and iPhone.

Now we can schedule around them.

Update: OmniFocus for iPhone 1.14 was just released! Update when you see it and don’t forget to turn iCloud Reminders back on.

File Under: iPad, iPhone, Products, OmniFocus

Bill, our User Experience Lead, traveled to Malmö, Sweden, in November of last year to give a couple of talks at Øredev, a conference focused on “the whole software development process.”

There are a few talks from Øredev that we’d especially like to pass along:

The first talk from Bill explores development lessons learned going from the Mac, to the iPhone, to the iPad, and back. Watch it here!

His second talk, Designing Graceful, Gracious Interfaces for iPad, has been given a few different times at the Voices That Matter conferences. You can find it over at Vimeo.

And Robby Ingebretsen, another Seattleite and Pixel Lab person, gave two awesome talks on Fonts, Form, and Function and an introduction to Design Composition.

They’re all insightful and worth throwing on to your ?tv when you have a spare hour or four.

Add all four videos to OmniFocus by tapping here.

File Under: Mac OS X Development, MISC

We’ve had the server up for almost two years now - it launched way back in April of 2010. In that time, the server has been scaled up from a Mac mini here in our offices to a collection of machines in our colocation facility, all working together to help you move your Omni apps’ data back and forth between your OS X and iOS devices, as well as to store backup copies of that data just in case things go totally diggstown and you need them.

When we launched the server, it was an OmniFocus-only affair, but we’ve added support for the server to all of our iOS apps. On the Mac, OmniFocus and OmniPlan have built-in support for the server as well. (The Mac apps that don’t already include support will get it in the future.)

So, to the tens of thousands of folks out there that have been storing your data on the server this whole time: thank you very much for being willing to sign up and help us build this thing. There’s always a seat for you on our little red wagon. To everyone else: if you were interested in using the server but didn’t want to sign up while it was in in a testing phase, we’re rolling out the red carpet for you. Head over to omnigroup.com/sync and set up an account.

Oh, and did we mention that you can have this all for the low, low price of zero? One of the things we learned is that we can build and run a service like this without needing to charge for it. Consider it a delicious after-dinner digestif you get whenever you buy one of our apps. Enjoy!

File Under: OmniOutliner, Products, OmniFocus, OmniGraffle, OmniGraphSketcher, OmniPlan, Releases

Each of the workshops this year was designed to be a quick, interactive run-through of just a few of the things you can do with one of our iPad apps. We’ve just posted videos of the workshops for anyone who didn’t get to see them on the show floor. If you want a five-minute intro to what a particular Omni product is all about, these are a pretty excellent way to get it.

• OmniGraffle: Wireframe Basics
• OmniGraffle: Space Planning
• OmniFocus: Basics
• OmniFocus: Daily To-Do
• OmniFocus: Weekly Review
• OmniOutliner: Crafting Classy Documents
• OmniOutliner: Building Budgets
• OmniGraphSketcher: Visualize Data

Enjoy!

File Under: iPad

OmniPlan has a new Sneaky Peek* out there for everyone to enjoy — especially if you’re an importer/exporter.

Our Microsoft Project import/export functionality has been rewritten, so we’d love it if you relayed any and all bugs back to us; if you can send us the Project file as well, that’d be even better. We really want to make sure this new process works well.

(For those wondering why it’s been rewritten: with the Mac App Store, we had to move our Project importer/exporter functionality to a plugin—installed separately—because it required Java. We want that to be built-in.)

Also new and notable! We’re getting started on multi-project support.

If you select an Address Book entry (with an email address) for a resource and then publish your plan files to our Sync Server, we’ll determine just how much that person can do for each project they’re participating in. All other Sync Repository projects are leveled as you update them.

Speaking of leveling: we now automatically level resources on the fly. It can be turned off, though, by visiting the Project menu.

Keep in mind that we’re not yet done and there may be issues we’re not aware of. (Issues we’d love to hear about!) If you need help getting it figured out, shoot us an email. Multi-project support has been a popular feature request for a while now, and we’re happy to push out what we’ve come up with so far.

It’s now also possible to resize Gantt chart bars; they’re now equivalent to the “Whole Document” font size.

“Anything else?” you’re asking. Well, sure. We’ve fixed quite a few bugs!

*Standard warning: Our Sneaky Peeks are not for the faint of heart. There will be bugs. We want to know them.

File Under: OmniPlan

Join us, if you would, on January 26th, 27th, and 28th at booth 802. (There’s no need for a map; it’s extremely close to the Exhibit Hall entrance.)

We won’t beg, but we’d love to see long-time users, show our stuff to some new users, and give away some Pretty Cool Things we had made up.

This is actually our 12th straight attendance, but I’m calling this Number One, because Frakes. And Ihnatko! No big deal.

There’s always something worth checking out at Macworld — at the very least, follow along with our Instagram (omnigroup) feed or our posts on Twitter: @omnigroup. We’ll be posting awesome things throughout our stay which will all be newsworthy, I’m sure.

Also: OmniPlan for iPad previews and a quick presentation on Friday at noon!

Take a gander at our presentation lineup by heading over to our permanent Macworld page, or read ahead.

Lastly, if you know of a fantastical ramen or dumpling place we should check out while we’re in San Francisco, comment or email!

File Under: MISC, News