We're The Omni Group, an elite team of special forces who develop productivity applications exclusively for Mac OS X.

The Omni Group is the developer of OmniWeb, a web browser offering far more than standard browsing features which won a 2004 Macworld Editor's Choice Award; OmniOutliner, an outlining and organizational tool which was awarded an Editor's Choice Award in December 2005; and OmniGraffle, a highly regarded diagramming application that received a 4.5 mouse product rating out of a possible 5 mice in the February 2006 Macworld magazine. We are located in beautiful Seattle, Washington.

In 1989, the founders of The Omni Group began working with some of the technologies that form the basis of Mac OS X. Our early consulting projects included creating a custom application for the William Morris Agency, and designing a database and security architecture for AT&T Wireless. The Omni Group was founded in 1993, and we've transitioned from a consulting/game porting business to the application developers we are today.

We've tried to put in words the ideas that motivate us as a company, the things that make us a team instead of just a collection of people who happen to work in the same office. We're happy to have this chance to share these ideas with you — please read more about our mission, philosophy, and ethics below!

To make software that is useful and fun, while supporting other companies that are creating useful and fun software.

What makes software fun?

Software should not just be useful, it should be so easy to use that it's actually fun. It has to work right. It shouldn't require you to know anything that it can figure out for itself. It shouldn't have features you won't use cluttering up the interface. It should have a narrow focus and do a good job at the stuff it does do, and work well with other programs that do other tasks. It should allow you to do simple things very quickly without learning anything and yet still allow you to do more complex things when you're ready.

For a lot of people, their entire experience with software is one frustration after another. We want to change that. We think software should be fun. The operating system should be fun, the programs you run should be fun.

Two steps to making software fun.

Step one: we're going to support the operating system that allows developers to write fun software easily, from the computer company that actually wants to encourage developers. Apple is the company we support. We're not loyal to Apple because we're Apple fanatics, we're loyal to Apple because they stand the best chance of helping make software fun again. They have, hands down, the best tools for developers in any market today. We believe Mac OS X is a superior platform both in terms of user experience and because its attributes let us develop better software faster.

Step two: we create useful, compelling, entertaining programs that run under Mac OS X. We show people that software can be fun. We inspire other companies. We spoil users, so they can't imagine going back to Windows and its ilk.

People who use OmniWeb love it because it's simple, and because it concentrates on letting users get to information quickly and easily, instead of trying to imitate a television. OmniGraffle, our diagramming application, and OmniOutliner, our outlining tool, follow a similar aesthetic - all the options you need to make great looking documents, without all the other crud cluttering up your interface. We work really hard on this stuff, and we hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

Our philosophy has three parts, in decreasing order of importance:

Create good software

Our top priority is to create good software. Every engineer loves creating good software. All you need to do is set up the environment so they can do it. That's where the beauty of Mac OS X comes to play — it's a superior operating system because it's more user friendly.

In typical application development situations, 90% of the programmer's time is spent writing and refining the basic user interface. This is time spent just getting the windows and buttons on the screen to minimally interact with the user, not time spent innovating. Under Cocoa, it's down from 90% to about 10%. This gives developers two huge advantages: 1) programming teams can be smaller (we wrote a whole web browser with three people, not 50). 2) a programmer's time can be spent actually innovating, creating new features and making them obvious and friendly and all that good stuff, instead of just getting the basics down and having to ship or go bankrupt.

What does this mean for users? It means the best is yet to come.

Make money

Let's not pretend. Omni is a business, and businesses must make money. Businesses that lose money can't make good software for very long.

Most companies have “Make money” as an invisible part of their mission statement, only it's at the top. We're honest enough to include money on our statement, but we're committed enough to put it after “Create good software”.

Have fun

This may seem almost flippant, but we're serious. If you've looked at our employment opportunities page, you'll know that we pay a lot of attention to making Omni fun - because we believe work should be fun, or there's really no point in doing it. If you enjoy what you do, you do a good job at it. We all enjoy creating great applications, but we have to make sure we enjoy the environment we work in and the projects we work on, or we'll burn out.

Having fun is important, but like the ant and the grasshopper, you have to know when to get to work so you can continue having fun. (Although, we've always kind of resented the ant's smugness and asceticism. Honestly, which of them would you rather have at a party?)

It is our company policy to care about our employees, our neighborhood, our environment, the world.

We try to write good software, represent it fairly, and stand behind it in any case.

Many corporations consider an act good if it benefits the company — even their charitable contributions are usually motivated by the good public relations, rather than the good of others. We believe that doing good is the highest priority in life, and that our company is an extension of ourselves, not a separate, amoral entity. “Doing good,” to us, doesn't necessarily mean quitting your job and joining the Peace Corps — it means living your life in such a way that you contribute more than you take from the world.

We have three base values that are very important to us:

1. Be honest.
2. Be honorable.
3. Be moral.

Being honest.

This one is easy. We won't lie to you. We've been told that, in business, you're allowed to lie occasionally. You can say, "Oh, we're almost done with that feature," when really you've barely started it. People expect it. Well, don't expect that from us. We will always be honest with you about the state of our products, and everything else.

Being honorable.

We use honorable here to mean: we will conform to our stated values. We won't compromise our values just because it would be easier, or cause less strife, or make us more money in the short run. We won't build crappy software just because we think it will sell.

Being moral.

We define a moral action as one which you would praise if someone else did it. It's that simple. (We borrowed this notion from a famous philosopher, actually.)

That's it.

It reads like a boyscout manual, doesn't it? But why can't a business be ethical? Why can't a company have values beyond "money good"?

We think that being honest, honorable, and moral is what keeps our customers loyal to us.