From manny at omnigroup.com Wed Jan 2 08:15:01 2002 From: manny at omnigroup.com (manny@omnigroup.com) Date: Thu Nov 3 13:04:59 2005 Subject: The Omni Group Ships OmniDictionary 2.0 Message-ID: <6BDF249A-FF9B-11D5-986A-00050237CCE1@omnigroup.com> The Omni Group Ships OmniDictionary 2.0 January 2, 2002 -- Seattle, Washington -- The long-awaited 2.0 version of OmniDictionary is finally available! It's FREE, which is not a very common word these days so you may want to look it up right after you download OmniDictionary. http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidictionary/ OmniDictionary is incredibly easy to use. Just download the application, launch it, and start looking up words. All you need is an Internet connection (unless you're hosting a local dictionary server, which OmniDictionary does not provide). OmniDictionary has been in beta for the past year (sorry, it doesn't pay the rent). We've fixed some bugs, added a few new features, and cleaned it up for final release. Here are some basic features along with release notes: - Connects to public dictionary servers and lets you look up words in any/all dictionaries hosted by those servers. - Provides a service to many other applications, so you can simply highlight a word in any of these apps (such as Mail or OmniWeb) and look it up via the Services menu. - Can speak the definitions to you aloud if you want. - Provides history to let you quickly return to words you previously looked up in this session. - Allows you to save definitions to a file, or copy them for use in another application. Release Notes Version 2.0 New Features ? Added Check for Updates item to the application menu. If you select this menu item, OmniDictionary will check to see if there is a more recent release available. If there is, you will be given the option of going directly to the download page for the new release. ? The dictionary popup now lists the dictionaries in alphabetical order. ? Added history-style navigation of prior lookups. You can now use the keyboard to navigate back to a word you defined earlier. ? Added speech support, so you can have the definitions read to you. ? Added support for saving the definition to a plain text file. ? Added support for showing the DICT server information. ? We now underline link references, and allow you to simply click on them to lookup the underlined word. (These are the words that previously showed up in curly braces.) We also do the same for guesses when the searched-for term is not found. ? Added server preferences, allowing you to set the dictionary server hostname, port, and timeout. ? Added font preference, so you can specify what font / font size you want for the definitions. ? Added the ability to manually disconnect from the server. (Hey - it's convenient for testing if nothing else.) ? Help and Release Notes are now available via the Help menu. User Interface ? Tweaked the UI, largely to conform to Aqua HI guidelines. ? Changed the default font used for definitions to a non-proportial font. The definitions returned by DICT servers are (at least typically) preformatted plain-text definitions, so using a proportional font ends up making them look less nice. ? Started anti-aliasing even small fonts, as otherwise the Mac OS X standard non-proportional font is not anti-aliased. ? Added a separator between definitions and label each definition with the dictionary from whence it came. ? We now change the mouse cursor when it goes over a link in the definition. ? The term combo box doesn't display any empty entries (unless nothing has yet been looked up, in which case it shows a single empty entry). It shows a maximum of ten entries before it gets a scrollbar. ? Adjusted the margins on the definition so it looks a bit better. ? When not connected to the dictionary server, or when in the process of connecting, we now display that status in the dictionary popup. Bug Fixes ? Printouts are now top-aligned rather than vertically centered. ? Printing now always prints the definition. Previously it would print the content of the term field if that field was selected. ? OmniDictionary can now reside in a folder (or descendant of a folder) with a forward slash in the name. (The problem was related to the old Launcher app we used to allow us to package the frameworks in the app; that trick is no longer needed.) ? When we're invoked as a Service, we now set the term before trying to connect to the server, so it's clearer what's going on. (Bug reported in a MacNN forum.) ? The zoom button actually zooms intelligently now. ? Fixed a bug where a link to another term wouldn't work correctly if the term was split across multiple lines in the definition. ? Stopped clearing out the term field and definition text area on connection/disconnection as it really wasn't necessary. ? Improved the automatic reconnection support, and stopped disabling controls when we're disconnected, so you can try a new definition and we'll simply try to reconnect. ? Scroll the definition text view to the top on a lookup, rather than potentially leaving you looking, say, halfway down the new definition. ? Added server connection timeouts, with the ability to reattempt if we fail to connect. ? We now scan our lexical tokens from server responses based on RFC 2229, obeying all its quoting rules, etc. ? Changed default dictionary server from www.dict.org to simply dict.org as that's what seems to be preferred and www.dict.org once stopped responding for a few days while dict.org remained available. ? Adjusted the names of our defaults settings (this may require you to update your OmniDictionary preferences again). Information about The Omni Group: The Omni Group, founded in 1993, develops Mac OS X applications including OmniWeb, OmniGraffle, and OmniOutliner; provides Mac OS X based consulting services such as porting games to Mac OS X; and employs 20 unique individuals who know lots of big words because they all use OmniDictionary! Information on The Omni Group is available at http://www.omnigroup.com/. Press Link: http://omnigroup.com/mailman/archive/omninews/2001/000084.html Press Contact: Manny Chao Omni Group Marketing 206-523-4152 ext. 290 206-523-5896 fax manny@omnigroup.com From manny at omnigroup.com Thu Jan 3 07:07:00 2002 From: manny at omnigroup.com (manny@omnigroup.com) Date: Thu Nov 3 13:04:59 2005 Subject: The Omni Group to attend Macworld, SF Message-ID: January 3, 2002 -- Seattle, Washington -- Just a quick announcement to let people know where to find us at Macworld, SF. The Omni Group will be at booth #542 located in the South (Main) Hall. Please come by for a visit to check out our latest stuff or just come by to say hello. It's one of the very few opportunities we get each year to meet you all face to face and to say thanks for all your support. Contact: Manny Chao The Omni Group 206-523-4152 ext. 290 manny@omnigroup.com From wjs at omnigroup.com Tue Jan 8 21:45:00 2002 From: wjs at omnigroup.com (William Jon Shipley) Date: Thu Nov 3 13:04:59 2005 Subject: The Omni Group Announces the First Plug-In for Apple's New iPhoto. Message-ID: The Omni Group Announces the First Plug-In for Apple's New iPhoto. January 8, 2002 -- Seattle, Washington -- The Omni Group today announced that they have written and released, for free, the first plug-in for Apple's new iPhoto application. This plug-in allows users to export iPhoto albums to Omni Group's 'OmniGraffle' diagramming application. Apple unveiled iPhoto yesterday at Steve Jobs' keynote for MacWorld Expo 2002. Wil Shipley, President of The Omni Group, commented, "Greg Titus, one of our engineers on OmniGraffle, was so excited by the release of iPhoto yesterday that he decided to write a PlugIn for it. Since we've been using Cocoa technologies for 13 years, it was easy to write our first one in a couple of hours. This plug-in was originally intended to be a proof-of-concept, but we decided to release it because it came out so well." Greg Titus added, "The iPhoto plug-in API is very well architected, and I am pleased that Omni and other third-parties are going to be able to make this great application even better." The new plug-in is available for free at: http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/extras/ Since Apple's iPhoto APIs are subject to change right now, this version of the plug-in might be made obsolete by future updates to iPhoto, but Omni will continue to revise the plug-in to keep it current with iPhoto revisions to the best of our ability. The iPhoto to OmniGraffle plug-in is free to everyone. OmniGraffle sells for $59.95 but, as announced yesterday, will also be free to buyers of new Apple PowerBooks and PowerMacs as part of Apple's new Mac OS X bundle. iPhoto is free from Apple for all users of Mac OS X. Press Contact: Manny Chao Omni Group Marketing 206-523-4152 ext. 290 206-523-5896 fax manny@omnigroup.com This press release should not be construed as speaking for Apple. From manny at omnigroup.com Fri Jan 18 06:32:18 2002 From: manny at omnigroup.com (manny@omnigroup.com) Date: Thu Nov 3 13:04:59 2005 Subject: The Omni Group Releases OmniGraffle 2.0 Beta Message-ID: The Omni Group Releases OmniGraffle 2.0 Beta Seattle, Washington -- January 18th, 2002 -- Today, The Omni Group released OmniGraffle 2.0 Beta. OmniGraffle is the powerful, yet fun and easy to use, diagramming and charting application built for Mac OS X. New features to version 2.0 Beta include AppleScript support, URL links to graphics, layer support, cool new tools, shape enhancements, line ending enhancements, export to HTML, grid enhancements, auto layout improvements, a magnet editor, OmniOutliner import preferences, and tons of bug fixes and miscellaneous enhancement. Phew. Download OmniGraffle 2.0 Beta at http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/. On that page, you can also download a PDF of our new OmniGraffle manual that is actually fun to read. See below for a complete list of 2.0 features and improvements (our engineers have been very busy.) For those customers that have already purchased a license of any version of OmniGraffle 1.x, The Omni Group is offering you a free upgrade to version 2. Wil Shipley, Omni President states, "Originally we were working on a free update that we were calling 'OmniGraffle 1.2,' which contained some bug fixes and a couple of new features users requested. However, our engineers did way too good of a job on the upgrade, adding oodles of cool new stuff, and it quickly became clear what we were working on was really OmniGraffle 2.0. But we still felt we owed our users the free bug fixes that were in there, as well. Since we're all about rewarding our customers, we decided that, for this upgrade only, the 2.0 release will be free to all OmniGraffle 1 users. This will also apply to all customers who will receive OmniGraffle 1 as part of Apple's new Power Mac and PowerBook bundle (which they announced on January 7 at http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2002/jan/07macosx.html). Your old license key will still work with OmniGraffle 2.0, so you just need to download the new version from us and you're set to start playing with all the great stuff we added." If you haven't yet, sign up for the OmniGraffle-Users mailing list http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/omnigraffle-users. Share tips, short-cuts, diagrams, shapes, palettes, rants and raves with other OmniGraffle users! Purchasing Information: Licenses for OmniGraffle can be purchased from Omni's online store https://store.omnigroup.com/cgi- bin/WebObjects/OnlineStore.woa/wa/storefront and is good for any OmniGraffle version 1.x or any version 2.x. OmniGraffle requires Mac OS X 10.1 or better. Information about The Omni Group: The Omni Group, founded in 1993, develops Mac OS X applications including OmniWeb, OmniGraffle, and OmniOutliner; provides Mac OS X based consulting services such as porting games to Mac OS X; and employs 20 unique individuals who mostly agree that Fatal Attraction is the scariest movie ever made. Information on The Omni Group is available at http://www.omnigroup.com/. Release Notes: - Summary of all the changes since 1.1 - Applescript Support - URLs linked to graphics - Any graphic can have a URL associated with it. - There are 3 ways to add a URL to a graphic - Drag a non-image file from the workspace and drop it on the graphic - Drag a URL from OmniWeb and drop it on the graphic - Edit the URL on the Link Info pane - There are 3 ways to navigate using links - There is a new Browse tool. In browse mode, any graphic with a link will highlight when the cursor is over it. Clicking on the graphic will open the link. - Choose Format->Show Links. A link symbol will appear next to each graphic that has a link. Clicking on the link symbol will open the link. - On the Link Info Pane, there is a "Follow Link" button. This will also open the link. - When importing PBProject and Framework files, it set the links to the appropriate files so you can browse projects easily this way - clicking on the boxes will open the header. - Added a new export format: HTML Image Map. It creates a with tags for all graphics with links. With this addition Graffle actually works really well as an image map creator by sticking a locked image on a lower layer and then drawing boxes on it and setting links on the boxes. - Layers - OmniOutliner import prefrences - user can create any number of outline styles - each style has a general layout preference and a list of prototype graphics, one graphic for each topic level. - prototype graphics can be modified using the info panes - More Tools - Zoom Tool - Polygon tool - Link Browser tool - Rubber Stamp Tool - The rubber stamp tool is useful for repeatedly placing the same graphic. If there is a graphic on the pasteboard, then each click with the rubber stamp tool will place a new copy of that graphic (it will beep if there is no graphic on the pasteboard). - Option-clicking with the rubber stamp tool will copy whatever graphic is clicked on to the pasteboard. - Tools Preferences for turning tools on and off - Shape Enhancements - Graded fills - Tiled Images - Improved autosizing/clipping control - Text can have inline images. - To add an image to text, you first have to be editing the text. Then it will accept drag/drop of images. This feature was added to try out a service for converting text to PDF mathematical symbols. - Option to turn off connections for graphics - Line Endings Enhancements - Underlying support for custom line endings - Added sliders for setting line ending size - Export panel additions - Export panel remembers the last export type. - Export panel lets you choose whether to export the graphics, the selection, a rectangular region, or the entire canvas. - Export panel also lets you set the compression, resolution, and background transparency. - Export to HTML Image Map - Grid Enhancements - Added a major grid that is slightly darker than the minor grid. - Added inspector controls for setting the major grid color, spacing and visibilty. - Made the grid visible by default. - Made grid semi-transparent by default. - Changed the templates to have the grid visible. - Changed the A4 and B5 templates to have a 0.5 cm grid (US Legal and Letter have 1/8 inch grid). - Align center to grid is now persistent - Auto-layout improvements - 10x speed improvement for force-directed layout (not including display time) - Added optional magnetic alignment fields - lines will tend to align themselves in the direction of the field - linear fields are can be at any angle - radial fields radiate outwards from a point that can be user set - Miscellaneous features - Arbitrary zoom values now show up on the zoom pop-up (instead of blank). - When a document is opened, it will scroll to the same area that was visible when the document was last saved. - Added a pop-up to the info toolbar configuration - CVS - If a .graffle file is a file wrapper and it has a CVS directory in it, then we preserve the CVS data. - Added a menu item for checking for newer versions - Hooked up a "Send Feedback..." menu item. - Added UML class graphic and UML inheritance arrowhead - Added a preference for "Remember Open Palettes". This will be on by default. It re-opens all of the palettes that were open when the application quit. - Added a color well to the font panel. Now you can set the text color for multiple graphics without having to select text individually and drag and drop the color from the color panel. - Bug Fixes and minor tweaks - Bitmap and pict images that are dragged and dropped into OmniGraffle are no longer converted to TIFF when the file is saved. They are saved with their original data. - Only saves images that are still being used. - Groups were not computing their bounds correctly if they were rotated. - It was crashing if lines that were connected to themselves got grouped. - Graphics with overflowing text had the wrong drawing bounds. - Size To Fit now sizes to fit the current number of pages instead of a 1x1 canvas. - Fixed a bug with scaled documents not printing correctly. - Page breaks no longer draw outside the bounds of the canvas. - Plugged some minor memory leaks - Made Info panel float - The grid size field was not localized - Hide/Show Magnets was not redisplaying the view. - The grid was being drawn on top of the page breaks and in the same color. Now we default to a darker page break color and always draw it after the grid, even if the grid is on top of the graphics. - Tripple-clicking on a graphic no longer ends editing... the 3rd click is passed on to the text editor. - Transparency is working for line labels. - Click-shift-drag had bizarre behavior - Printed images were getting clipped by a half pixel - PDF images were scaling like bitmaps - Holding shift while creating lines should constrain the current segment to 45 degree increments. - Arrow keys should apply to the selected line or polygon knob - Should be able to delete the last point in a line - Clean up the palette code so that there are never duplicates - Shadows now have a default transparency of 50%, and they respond to changes in the transparency. - Fixed a problem with replacing a flat file with a file wrapper. This was broken with the last release of OSX. - Can undo setting page break and canvas colors. - Documents from templates and saved documents were not being centered correctly when first opened - Made the palette viewer a floating window. - Clicking on the Info, Palette, and Selections buttons will now hide there respective windows if they are already open. - "Show Info" changes to "Hide Info" if the panel is visible. - "Show Selection" changes to "Hide Selection" if the panel is visible. - Changed the initial license warning to say 20 objects instead of 10 objects. - Fixed a bug with DOT importing where it was trying to process "node" as a keyword, instead of just a string. - DOT import was choking on nested {}'s - Added support for the full DOT color table - Fixed a crasher related to grouping lines that point to the endpoints of other lines. - Shadows were being clipped by a pixel on PDF export. - Fixed the problem with graphics not scrolling unless the mouse is moving. - Fixed the problem with nudged graphics getting pushed out of view. - Info panes do a better job of hide/show. - Changes from 2.0 Beta (v3) to 2.0 Beta (v4) only - AppleScript Support - OmniOutliner import prefrences - Auto-layout improvements - 10x speed improvement in force-directed layout (not including display time) - added optional magnetic alignment fields - Export panel additions - Export panel remembers the last export type. - Export panel lets you choose whether to export the graphics, the selection, a rectangular region, or the entire canvas. - Export panel also lets you set the compression, resolution, and background transparency. - Grid Enhancements - Added a major grid that is slightly darker than the minor grid. - Added inspector controls for setting the major grid color, spacing and visibilty. - Made the grid visible by default. - Made grid semi-transparent by default. - Changed the templates to have the grid visible. - Changed the A4 and B5 templates to have a 0.5 cm grid (US Legal and Letter have 1/8 inch grid). - Linked URL fixes - Changed is so that when html files are generated, it also generates an associated bitmap, and added an export preference for picking the bitmap. - Drag and drop of urls and files is working for lines. - "Follow Link" saves the currently typed url before following it. - Made more area on the link inspector for displaying urls. - Graphics within a group were not showing their links. This has been fixed. - If a url starts with "www.", then we prepend "http://". - Misc - Align center to grid should be persistent - Arbitrary zoom values now show up on the zoom pop-up (instead of blank). - When a document is opened, it will scroll to the same area that was visible when the document was last saved. - Fixed the problem with the palette window refusing to stay hidden. - Fixed the problem with nudged graphics getting pushed out of view. - Fixed the bug with picas not showing up correctly on the size info pane. - Added a preference for "Remember Open Palettes". This will be on by default. It re-opens all of the palettes that were open when the application quit. - Flooring the bounds of the text seems to get rid of the problem with blurry embedded images. - Info panes do a better job of hide/show. - Hooked up a "Send Feedback..." menu item. - Bitmap and pict images that are dragged and dropped into OmniGraffle are no longer converted to TIFF when the file is saved. They are saved with their original data. - Added a color well to the font panel. Now you can set the text color for multiple graphics without having to select text individually and drag and drop the color from the color panel. - Imroved DOT import support - full color table - handles nested {} - Turned off drawing of the minor grid if the on-screen spacing was less than 4 pixels Press Link: http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/archive/omninews/2002/000087.html Press Contact: Manny Chao Omni Group Marketing 206-523-4152 ext. 290 206-523-5896 fax manny@omnigroup.com From manny at omnigroup.com Tue Jan 22 21:02:46 2002 From: manny at omnigroup.com (manny@omnigroup.com) Date: Thu Nov 3 13:04:59 2005 Subject: OmniGraffle 2.0 Beta Bug Fix Message-ID: <2E0FFE1E-0F7D-11D6-9546-00050237CCE1@omnigroup.com> An updated OmniGraffle 2.0 Beta is available for download. This release fixes a major "Send Feedback..." bug. In the previous Beta, OmniGraffle would crash when registered users used the "Send Feedback..." feature in the help menu. That's really bad, since the whole point of a Beta is to get feedback from our users. It's fixed now. :) The latest release of OmniGraffle 2.0 Beta can be downloaded from http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnigraffle/. Here's a list of a few more fixes. Please continue to send us feedback. Thanks! - Changes from 2.0 Beta v4 to 2.0 Beta v6 - If you clicked on the Text tool in the preferences panel before bringing up the font panel, you started getting lots of alert panels and the app became unusable. - Fixed the "Send Feedback..." crasher (v5) and script error (v6) - Fixed a sporadic bug with invalid selectors getting sent to the NSColorPanel. - Fixed a bug where an Alert panel would come up if you tried to hide the major grid. - Fixed a special case where the palette viewer would never become visible. - Tools-Palettes->Edit Palette was raising an error if the palette viewer had not been opened. - Double-clicking on a graphic with colored text was resetting the color to black. - The Align button on the Grid Info pane was not hooked up. - Using the zoom tool to set a zoom region was getting the wrong zoom level if the document was already zoomed. - When printing, print jobs were going to the Print Center as untitled instead of with the document name. - Added some more space in the vertical ruler for displaying in points. - Got rid of some rendering dirt in the ruler when moving graphics caused the view to scroll. - Added 5 more shapes and 2 new palettes (Boolean Gates and Information Architecture) - Switched to an Update preferences pane instead of a "Check For Updates..." menu item. - PDF images were looking like bitmaps when zoomed in. - When PDF is pasted into the middle of text, it no longer gets converted to TIFF. - Exporting to HTML wasn't handling spaces in the file name. - Links now also support AppleScript links. They show little script icons when Show Links is turned on, and clicking on them runs the associated script. The Link Inspector has URL and Script tabs now, and the Script tab has some rudimentary script editing capabilities. - Force-directed layout... - Runs in a separate thread. - Brings up a progress indicator and lets you stop layouts in progress. - No longer has a problem with perfectly overlapping graphics. Press Contact: Manny Chao The Omni Group 206-523-4152 ext. 290 manny@omnigroup.com From manny at omnigroup.com Thu Jan 31 07:53:06 2002 From: manny at omnigroup.com (manny@omnigroup.com) Date: Thu Nov 3 13:04:59 2005 Subject: OmniGraffle 2.0 Beta v7 Now Available Message-ID: <1AF22CB8-1662-11D6-A49D-00050237CCE1@omnigroup.com> OmniGraffle 2.0 Beta v7 Now Available Seattle, Washington -- January 31, 2002 -- A new Beta of OmniGraffle 2.0 is now available for download. Download the latest release at http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/ and please send your feedback to omnigraffle@omnigroup.com. OmniGraffle 2.0 Beta v7 includes improvements on stability, some bug fixes, and numerous tweaks. Check out the totally cool and improved AppleScript support that goes beyond just mere AppleScript support (we'll have a fancy marketing term for it when we come up with one). See the release notes below. Information about OmniGraffle 2.0 Beta: New features to version 2.0 Beta include AppleScript support, URL links to graphics, layer support, cool new tools, shape enhancements, line ending enhancements, export to HTML, grid enhancements, auto layout improvements, a magnet editor, and OmniOutliner import preferences. Remember that full, licensed versions of OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner are now shipping with new Power Mac G4s and Titanium Powerbook G4s. OmniGraffle 2.0 Beta requires Mac OS X 10.1 Pricing information and availability: A free limited version of OmniGraffle is available for download at http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/. OmniGraffle can be purchased from Omni's online store http://store.omnigroup.com for $59.95 (check out our new boxes! -- $64.95 for a boxed OmniGraffle and you get a manual that is actually fun to read). Education discounts are available and customers who purchase or have purchased any version of OmniGraffle 1.x will receive a free upgrade to OmniGraffle 2.0. Also, be sure to sign up on our OmniGraffle-Users mailing list to share your favorite Graffle's! Information about The Omni Group: The Omni Group, founded in 1993, develops Mac OS X applications including OmniWeb, OmniGraffle, and OmniOutliner; provides Mac OS X based consulting services such as porting games to Mac OS X; and employs 20 unique individuals who all agree that Kevin Bacon is the center of the universe. Information on The Omni Group is available at http://www.omnigroup.com/. Release Notes 2.0v7 - Stability - Crash Catcher was reporting a "End of Script" error. - We were getting a crash whenever the line spacing well on the ruler was clicked. - Using the Apply button on the color panel was locking up the app. - There was a crash related to making font and color changes. The crash was usually delayed, making it a little harder to track down. This should be fixed now. - Features, fixes and minor tweaks - More AppleScript support - AppleScripts can be configured on the toolbar, complete with custom icons. - AppleScripts can be attached to individual graphics. - "Edit->Copy As->AppleScript" copies the current selection as AppleScript source. - Added extended text support. - Added more ERD and IA line endings, and modified the IA palette. - The Size Info pane can be used to set the dimensions of lines that are not connected to anything. - Added preferences for newline insertion, label creation, and line creation. - Added right-to-left and bottom-to-top hierarchical layout. - Added Bigger and Smaller menu items to the Font menu. - Added an opacity slider for images. - Made shadows draw lighter if the fill color was partially transparent. - Transparency in text is preserved when saved. - Groups can now have magnets and you can set whether connections should be made to the group, or its components. The control for this is on the Magnets Info pane. - Project Builder/Framework Imports look a lot nicer, and there are preferences for whether to show categories, protocols, and/or classes outside of the project/framework. - Added options for ordering of children during hierarchical layout and fixed it so that we were no longer reversing the order of topics when importing outlines. - "Make Natural Size" and "Size To Fit Image" were not working. - Made the shapes on the shape inspector larger and less blurry. - Free text was jumping around to much when moved. - Fixed a bug where the points of lines were getting off grid when moving several graphics and lines at the same time. - Also, horizontal and vertical lines were getting one pixel off grid when moved. - The url and script fields on the link inspector get cleared when no graphics with links are selected. - When dragging from a zoomed canvas into another app, we were dropping unzoomed, when we should have been maintaining the original scale. - Fixed the bug where text was shifting slightly after editing. - If there is a locked graphic with a link on a palette, then clicking on the graphic will follow the link. (the Garrett IA palette has an example of this) - We beep if we go to open a url and it fails. - Graphics were getting highlighted during line creation even if connections were not allowed. - Change the highlighting of lines to make it more clear when a connection to a line will snap to a point, and when it will add a point. - There was a sporadic bug with the export pane where it wouldn't let you change the file type. Rewrote the code that handles this. Please send feedback if you are still seeing the problem. - UML class graphics were not displaying there text until moved, and were not rotating correctly. - Add the missing "Links" menu item to the "Tools > Info Panes" menu. Press Link: http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/archive/omninews/2002/000089.html Press Contact: Manny Chao Omni Group Marketing 206-523-4152 ext. 290 206-523-5896 fax manny@omnigroup.com From manny at omnigroup.com Tue Feb 19 12:02:04 2002 From: manny at omnigroup.com (manny@omnigroup.com) Date: Thu Nov 3 13:04:59 2005 Subject: OmniGraffle Gets a New Look in the Latest Beta Release! Message-ID: <9851E022-2572-11D6-9BBF-00050237CCE1@omnigroup.com> OmniGraffle Gets a New Look in the Latest Beta Release! February 19, 2002 -- Seattle, Washington -- Today, The Omni Group released the latest Beta of OmniGraffle 2.0, Omni's popular diagramming and charting application designed for Mac OS X. Highlighted in this latest release are big improvements in the user interface: check out the new icons, improved panels, and the cool new features by downloading the latest beta at http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/download/. This new beta also improves stability and performance; see the release notes for a complete list of changes. As we make the push to the final of OmniGraffle 2.0, please continue to send bug reports and feature requests to omnigraffle@omnigroup.com, or visit http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/omnigraffle-users to sign up on our OmniGraffle users mailing list. The mailing list is the best place to get immediate feedback and advice on using OmniGraffle for your digramming and charting projects. Information about OmniGraffle: OmniGraffle 2.0 Beta requires Mac OS X 10.1. A free viewer / trial version can be downloaded from http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/ or licenses can be purchased for $59.95 ($34.95) at http://store.omnigroup.com/. A license for any version of OmniGraffle 1.x (including the free ones in the new Apple pro hardware bundle) will be good for any version of OmniGraffle 2.x. Release Notes OmniGraffle 2.0 Beta v8: - User Interface - The big changes in this release are in the user interface. There are lots of new icons and many of the panels have been cleaned up and improved. - Stability - Used to crash when changing the units if the export panel had been opened, but was no longer visible. - Performance - Fixed the bug that was causing the zoomed documents to completely redraw every time a graphic was changed. - Opening the the palette viewer no longer visually cycles through the history of previously opened palettes. - New Features - Unconnected lines can be rotated and flipped. - Added a "Save As Template" menu item. - Hierarchical layout now supports rank assignment (either min, max, or same). - Added a magnification slider to the Magnet Info pane. We're also drawing a grid, though we are not yet snapping to the grid. There is still more fine tuning to be done here, but this at least allows for much finer control of magnet placement. - Added menu items for Zoom In, Zoom Out, and Actual size, with the keyboard shortcuts from Preview.app. - "Check for Updates" menu item and preferences pane. - Added a toolbar button for turning snap-to-grid on and off. - Applescript changes - Scripting stuff: add "with properties" phrase to "connect" verb. Made points copyable. Made lines not include origin or size when copying as applescript. - Copy as AppleScript now works correctly for lines and polygons. - Copy As Applescript now generates nested tell blocks with make commands inside for nested groups. - Fixes - Two part fix to the shadow printing problem: - 1) when we are printing or exporting to PDF/EPS, we blend the shadow color with the canvas color instead of using alpha. - 2) added a preference for having the shadows draw behind everything else (default is YES) so that printed shadows won't obscure lines etc. - Outline filter was not setting the preferred order to be back-to-front. - Copy-paste was pasting the graphics in the reverse order. - Select all no longer selects graphics on locked or invisible layers. - We are no longer losing the line height information when figuring out the height of text (as a side effect, the line spacing well is disabled, but the line spacing buttons still work). - Fixed a bug where turning on line labels using the mode bar in preferences was not updating the info pane to enable the sliders. - Setting the auotsizing to clip was leaving rendering dirt. - New documents default to "US Letter" and are full-sized when opened. The default template will be localizable. - The export pane now uses a pop up button to choose between dots-per-inch and dots-per-point. Information about The Omni Group: The Omni Group, founded in 1993, develops Mac OS X applications including OmniWeb, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, and OmniDiskSweeper, ports games to Mac OS X, and employs 20 unique individuals who believe that Ice Dancing Hockey would be a fun new Olympic sport. Information on The Omni Group is available at http://www.omnigroup.com. Press Link: http://omnigroup.com/mailman/archive/omninews/2001/000090.html Press Contact: Manny Chao Omni Group Marketing 206-523-4152 ext. 290 206-523-5896 fax manny@omnigroup.com From manny at omnigroup.com Fri Mar 15 08:39:03 2002 From: manny at omnigroup.com (manny@omnigroup.com) Date: Thu Nov 3 13:04:59 2005 Subject: The Omni Group Announces OmniOutliner 2.0, Releases Public Beta Message-ID: The Omni Group Announces OmniOutliner 2.0, Releases Public Beta Seattle, Washington -- March 15, 2002 -- Today, The Omni Group released the first public beta of OmniOutliner 2.0, the first major rev of the popular outlining application built exclusively for Mac OS X. A host of new and very cool features have been added to help you outline like you've never outlined before. Features new to OmniOutliner 2.0 include a new customizable toolbar, new column types, notes, auto-numbering, sorting, summary values, new keyboard shortcuts, support for alternating row colors, an updated info window to support all of these new features, and more. What does all of this mean? Instead of being a really simple tool that can help you get organized, OmniOutliner is now a really good-looking, powerful, simple-to-use tool that can help you get organized. Check out the release notes for a complete list of new features and enhancements. OmniOutliner 2.0 beta 1 includes an extended trial license that expires on May 1, 2002 and can be downloaded from http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnioutliner/. Support and Feedback: Please be aware that this is beta software. It is always a good idea to back up your existing files before opening them with a new version; this is especially important when testing a beta version. Please send all bug reports and feedback to omnioutliner@omnigroup.com, and you can sign up on our OmniOutliner-Users mailing list to share your latest and greatest OmniOutliner happy thoughts with other OmniOutliner users (or if you feel like venting to our engineers, you can do that there as well). Visit http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/omnioutliner-users to sign up. Pricing and upgrading information OmniOutliner 2.0 will retail for $29.95 ($19.95 educational price). If you currently own a license of OmniOutliner 1, you can upgrade to version 2 when it is released for an upgrade fee of $9.95 ($6.58 educational upgrade). Starting today (March 15, 2002), customers who purchase a license of OmniOutliner 1.2 before the release of OmniOutliner 2.0 final will receive a free upgrade to OmniOutliner 2.0. The retail price of OmniOutliner 1.2 is $21.12 so essentially, you're getting a price discount on OmniOutliner 2.0 if you buy a license now! Release Notes: - OmniOutliner 2.0 beta 1 (v17) - The 2.0 beta includes an expiring demo license. Upgrades will be available through our online store once the final version is ready. It is always a good idea to back up your existing files before opening them with a new version; this is especially important when testing a beta version. - New Features - Column Types - Each column can have a type associated with it: - Rich Text. This is the only type that previous versions supported. - Checkbox. Now you can have columns of checkboxes. - Date - Duration - Number - Enumeration. You can have popups to select values. For example Priority (High, Medium, Low), Owner (Alice, Bob, Charlie, Eve). - Text. Plain text, no text formatting. - Each column can have a summary type, which automatically sets the column value based on the corresponding child values (if the row has any children): - Calculated. Summary values are calculated from the item's immediate children. Checkboxes are smart (checked if all children are checked, unchecked if no children are checked, indeterminate if some but not all children are checked). Numbers and durations are summed. Enumerations take minimum value. Dates take the latest date. - None. Summary values are not calculated. This is the same as in previous versions of outliner (with the exception of checkboxes, which were always calculated). - Hidden. Values are only displayed at the leaf level. This might be good for a side by side comparison of the features of two products. The features are in the outline column, and each product has a checkbox column. - Notes - Each item can have a note that appears in a separate text area below the outline. A special note column displays an icon if an item has a note, making it easy to see which items have attached notes. - Numbering - Auto-numbering of rows is now supported. Several numbering styles are available, and the style may be set on a per-level basis. - Now sports a customizable toolbar. - Updated the Info window to support the new features. - Sorting. Rows can be sorted by the values in a column. - Command-click on the column title to sort by that column. An icon will be drawn on the right side of the column title to indicate that the column has been sorted. Command-click again to sort descending, and once more to stop sorting. This is a one-time sort of the values so that rows don't jump around when you add new rows. When you add or remove a row the column the sorting indicator disappears. - Command-option-click on the column title to keep sorting by that column as you add new rows. - Added a software update preference panel to make it easier to determine if there is a newer version of OmniOutliner available. - Enhancements - The outline column is no longer required to be the first column. - New keyboard preferences. You can make the return key split a row into two rows. The new row can optionally be created at the same level, or as a child if the row already has children. - Added support for alternating row colors. - Added support for column background colors. - Bug Fixes - None. Information about The Omni Group: The Omni Group, founded in 1993, develops Mac OS X applications including OmniWeb, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, and OmniDiskSweeper, ports games to Mac OS X, and employs 22 unique individuals who all agree that making lists with OmniOutliner is a fun and productive family-friendly activity. Information on The Omni Group is available at http://www.omnigroup.com. Press Link: http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/archive/omninews/2002/000091.html Press Contact: Manny Chao Omni Group Marketing 206-523-4152 ext. 290 206-523-5896 fax manny@omnigroup.com From wjs at omnigroup.com Tue Apr 2 00:28:03 2002 From: wjs at omnigroup.com (William Shipley) Date: Thu Nov 3 13:04:59 2005 Subject: The Omni Group Ships OmniGraffle 2.0, Announces Free Upgrade Message-ID: <5D6630C6-4613-11D6-B8E5-003065F6EF80@omnigroup.com> "The Omni Group Ships OmniGraffle 2.0, Announces Free Upgrade" For Immediate Release Seattle, Washington -- April 1, 2002 -- The Omni Group today shipped version 2.0 of OmniGraffle, the symbolic drawing program built specifically for Mac OS X. Version 2.0 adds a passel of new features, including the addition of layers, handy new drawing tools and modes, embedded hyperlinks and more web export options, incredibly rich AppleScript support, editable magnets on shapes, a much more advanced and faster layout panel, and the first of some beautiful new object palettes that really show off how diverse a program OmniGraffle really is. Plus we threw in a bunch of performance enhancements and bug fixes, because, well, there were some slow spots and bugs in 1.0. (But not 2.0, it's perfect in every way.*) More information and a free trial download are available at http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnigraffle/. Amazingly, the upgrade is free to registered users of OmniGraffle 1.0. FREE! Read the first paragraph again, you can't believe it, can you? Even though it's April 1st, this isn't a prank. (But please do see our separate press release, "The Omni Group announces it has contracted Russian space agency to send the rest of N'Sync into space, as well.") We decided to be generous on this upgrade to reward all of OmniGraffle's early adopters, who believed in us (-sniffle!-), put up with the minor difficulties in version 1.0, and have been so helpful with their gentle suggestions for what should go into the 2.0 version (eg: "Speed it up, chowderheads!"). But don't get too used to this, you'll be paying for 3.0. (Sorry, we've got to make some money here.) The free upgrade even includes everyone who has received or will receive a free version of OmniGraffle as part of Apple's pro machine bundle. Ken Case, Omni's Director of Engineering states, "I can't believe Kevin has released two major versions of OmniGraffle and I still haven't gotten the OmniWeb update out." Wil Shipley, President of Omni added, "I have nothing to say here because I'm writing this press release, so, in a sense, all these words are my quotes." What is OmniGraffle? OmniGraffle is a new kind of drawing program that lets you draw with symbols instead of doodling freehand, like Adobe(R) Photoshop(R), or plotting curves, like Adobe(R) Illustrator(R). While both of those are great programs (and we own and use them both at Omni), they are intended to help artist create art, while OmniGraffle is designed to help you lay out your ideas, play with them, and then show them to other people. For this purpose other drawing programs have two major drawbacks: they require that you have artistic talent, and they aren't really designed to let you play with ideas visually; moving objects around willy-nilly and changing entire classes of them at once. With all this hand-waving you may be thinking, "But what would I actually USE OmniGraffle for?" To which we'd respond, "Hey, don't end a sentence with a preposition." But after that we'd say that you can use OmniGraffle to draw out anything that can be represented by symbols and lines: you can use it to lay out office furniture in a new building, draw a network diagram, make a flow chart, map where files are supposed to go on your hard disk, chart how glucose molecules are processed during digestion, make a family tree, draw up an org chart, plot out your database's ER design, rough out a screenplay... if you've ever had to draw something on a whiteboard, chances are good you could have drawn it clearer, prettier, faster, and more clearly using OmniGraffle. And you would have been able to save it for later and share it on the web, too. OmniGraffle is often compared to Visio(R), which gives people a decent idea of our genre, but there are obvious differences between the two: many people have told us OmniGraffle is a lot more fun and easy to use, and thus useful, but on the other hand Visio has more modes for accomplishing some specific kinds of tasks. Visio also costs about four times as much, appears to be aimed only at business types, and doesn't run on Macintoshes. (So nyah.) What's Cool About This Release in Particular? Layers: Can be created and you can set whether to lock, hide, or print them on a new Info pane. New drawing tools and modes: additions include (but not limited to) new rubber-stamp tool, zoom tool, polygon tool, link browser tool, new line endings for ERD and IA, plus new drawing options like graded fills, tiled images, and partially transparent images (this last added at the behest of a certain Apple V.P.). See the release notes for an exhaustive list, it's huge. AppleScript: You can install scripts to control OmniGraffle and they will automatically show up in its menu and in the "Customise Toolbar" panel, so any script can be put on your toolbar (with a custom icon, even). Any AppleScripts can also now be attached to diagram objects; they execute when the object is clicked. For example, we have used this to create a simulator that shows the flow of electricity throw various gates, written entirely in AppleScript. Finally, you can also copy any shapes you've drawn as AppleScript commands, and then paste those commands into a text editor to see the exact AppleScript you'd need to use to recreate those shapes. This is great for creating live documents: first draw out how you want things to look, then copy them as AppleScript, then add the code to make them live, and voila! We used this to make a little AppleScript that can take an OmniOutliner file and make a graphical calendar of events in it using OmniGraffle. Embedded hyperlinks and more web export options: You can attach hyperlinks to web sites or to local files to any shape, and then if you lock the shape clicking on it will open the link. To show off the power of this, we've also included support to drag frameworks and Project Builder files into OmniGraffle, it then automatically creates a hierarchy of classes, lays them out, and links each one to the actual source file, so when you click on a class its file is opened in Project Builder. Image export is much improved, and we've added the ability to output an OmniGraffle document as an HTML image map, which makes it one of the easiest ways to create image maps in existence. Magnets: Can be edited on a per-shape or per-group basis now, using a new Info pane. Advanced and faster layout panel: Doing a layout now brings up a progress sheet, and you can cancel long layouts. Force-directed layout now has magnetic fields to help prevent overlapping lines. Hierarchical layout allows you to set rank assignments on objects so they lay out consistently, and allows you to pick from more directions (right-to-left, bottom-to-top). New Palettes: The first of our free new palettes, "Office Layout," full of beautiful, fully resizable furniture which are all to scale with each other, and "Network," full of all kinds of networking gadgets and computers, including a really pretty Apple G4 Cube. For a bunch more detail into what's changed, visit http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/releasenotes/. OmniGraffle Licensing and Pricing: OmniGraffle can be downloaded and used as a free OmniGraffle viewer. You can also use OmniGraffle in unlicensed mode to do anything you want to any number of documents with less than twenty items in them, so you can get a feel for how the program works, draw some graphs, play with the animated layout, and get comfortable with the application. Once you've used OmniGraffle for a while, we bet you'll want to edit documents with more than twenty items, and then you can buy a license to fully enable the app. System Requirements: Mac OS X version 10.1.3. Information about The Omni Group: The Omni Group, forged in 1993 from courage, righteousness, and raw steel, develops Mac OS X applications including OmniWeb, OmniGraffle, and OmniOutliner; ports games to Mac OS X because really, what's a platform without games; and employs a bunch of unique individuals who all agree that "Andy Richter Controls the Universe" is the best show on television, at least until Fox cancels it. More information on The Omni Group is available at http://www.omnigroup.com/company/, including a bunch of pages where we spout our manifesto for being good people and writing good software, if you're into that touchy-feely stuff. Press link: http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/archive/omninews/2002/000092.html Press Contact: Wil Shipley President, The Omni Group USA: 800.315.OMNI x201 NOT: 206.523.4152 x201 DISCLAIMERS: * OmniGraffle is not actually guaranteed to be perfect in every way. For instance, it's not good to eat. No eat! (R) Various trademarks and registered trademarks mentioned in this press release are owned by other companies and are protected words that must be spoken with the utmost reverence only. From linda at omnigroup.com Tue May 7 10:38:14 2002 From: linda at omnigroup.com (Linda Sharps) Date: Thu Nov 3 13:04:59 2005 Subject: Omni Group ships Outliner 2.0 Message-ID: <5837316E-61E0-11D6-8D2D-00050237CCE1@omnigroup.com> Announcing OmniOutliner 2.0! May 6, 2002 Official (yawn) Omni press release here: http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/archive/omni-press/2002-May/000018.html Recently spotted on versiontracker.com: " Best outliner/checklist/project manager for OS X." ? "...this product is essential for me both as a student for taking notes and as a programmer for planning releases of my software." "It is, perhaps, among the most simple and elegant programs I have ever seen." "Tons better than the awkward, bloated outline view in Word." "I tried using OmniOutliner just to see what it did, and now I don't know what I would do without it. " "It has quickly replaced several other applications and is my main work environment now." ? These are all actual quotes from REAL users that have tried OmniOutliner 2.0 and are now raving lunatics, staggering around with their arms outstretched, foaming at the mouth from the sheer AWESOMENESS that is Outliner. Ok, so maybe I'm exaggerating a tad. That's a marketing weasel for you. But I tell you with all honesty, people are digging Outliner 2.0. The thing about OmniOutliner is, you use it a few times and then you completely forget how you got things done before. It's all indispensable and handy, just like oxygen. "Come on," you might say, furrowing your brow. "What can really be so great about an outlining tool?" Okay then, smartypants. Just try it. Download it here: http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnioutliner and give it a whirl. Take some meeting notes, make up a grocery list, or start an essay on the ten worst movies you saw last year (THAT shouldn't be hard - remember Jurassic Park 3?). Aha. NOW you get it. Now you're all smooth-browed and foamy. What can you do with Outliner? Let's say you are tracking a software project. With Outliner, you can create a column to track which person is doing what, add multiple checkbox columns to track the status of cach task and subtask, establish schedules with time tracking, attach detailed notes to specific items, export the whole shebang as HTML, impress the HECK out of your boss, and hey isn't it time for that raise? The moral of the story is that with a contrived example, you can prove anything. Er. No, what I mean to say is that Outliner has features to support anything from detailed task management to simple documents like grocery lists. You can maintain multiple to-dos, create agendas, manage tasks, track expenses, write legal briefs, take meeting notes, monitor project status - or maybe just make a big old list of all the lists you need to make. (We'd like that.) What are the new features? New features in OmniOutliner 2.0 were designed to support more in-depth task and time tracking activities, with efficient new ways to get organized and stay on top of your projects. Column Types Each Outliner document column now has a type associated with it, to provide column styles and perform functions. Column types include: Rich Text, Text, Checkbox, Date, Number, Duration, and Popup List. Duration allows you to track the time invested in a project in terms of hours and days. Popup List contains user-defined values, such as Priority (High, Medium, Low), or Owner (Alice, Bob, Charlie), that can be assigned to a specific task or item. Column Summary Types Each column can have a summary type, which automatically sets a top level item value (IE "Weekly Grocery Cost") based on the item's corresponding sub values (IE "soda" + "bakery items" + "produce"). Summary values are summed from lower level numbers and durations. Summaries can also be hidden, to display values only at the main level. Notes Each item can now have a note that appears in a separate text area below the outline. A special note column displays an icon if an item has a note - making it easy to see which items have attached notes. Numbering Auto-numbering of rows includes multiple numbering styles. Styles may be set on a per-level basis. So, what's the damage? OmniOutliner can be downloaded as a free trial, with some limited functionality. You can basically do anything you want to any number of documents with less then twenty items in them, so you can get a feel for how the program works and discover how useful it really is. Once you're hooked, you'll doubtlessly decide to spring for the $29.95 cost. If you're a licensed 1.0 user, or if you have purchased a PowerBook or Power Mac since January (Psst! That means you've got both OmniOutliner 1.0 AND OmniGraffle 1.0 installed already! Woo hoo!) the upgrade cost is only $9.95. Here's the deal - OmniOutliner 2.0 is the perfect application for anyone who wants to gather together bits of information and impose some sort of order upon them. (Especially great for power-hungry supervillains) From smart checkboxes to AppleScript support to multiple import/export options, Outliner 2.0 is sure to become your must-have productivity tool. And like all Omni products, OmniOutliner 2.0 leverages powerful Aqua features to provide you with a seamless OS X user experience. It looks great, and as a bonus, we've also made it WORK great. We think so, and we think you'll agree with us. To download OmniOutliner, visit http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnioutliner. To purchase licenses, visit http://www.omnigroup.com/store, email us at sales@omnigroup.com, or call us at one of the phone numbers below. The Omni Group 2707 NE Blakeley St Seattle WA 98105 www.omnigroup.com 800-315-OMNI 206-523-4152 Questions? Comments? Rants and/or Raves? Let us know at marketing@omnigroup.com. +++ To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change your settings, use the following link: http://www.omnigroup.com/company/omninews/ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 6622 bytes Desc: not available Url : /mailman/archive/omninews/attachments/20020507/4afbed4e/attachment.bin From linda at omnigroup.com Tue May 7 12:03:16 2002 From: linda at omnigroup.com (Linda Sharps) Date: Thu Nov 3 13:04:59 2005 Subject: Omni Group ships ObjectMeter 2.0 Message-ID: <77679304-61EC-11D6-8D2D-00050237CCE1@omnigroup.com> Announcing OmniObjectMeter 2.0 May 6, 2002 Official Omni press release: http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/archive/omni-press/2002-May/000017.html We're just bursting with new announcements lately, aren't we? Shipping two products (Outliner 2.0 as well as ObjectMeter) on the same day even. Mountain Dew has been disappearing around here at an alarming rate, let me tell you. So - as you may know, the majority of The Omni Group are developers, with the notable exception of our fabulous marketing manager (preen), our lovely and snarky office manager, our ridiculously helpful support staff, and our talented chefs (mmm....seared scallops). Lo, there be geeks at Omni. Brilliant geeks, though, who spend 18+ hours a day cranking out code - some of which makes it into our public applications and some that turns into productivity tools for internal use. That's how ObjectMeter was created, as an insanely helpful app that our developers used to optimize code. And then we said to ourselves, we said "Selves, let us not hog the joy that is OmniObjectMeter. Let's share it with the other brilliant geeks out there, so everyone is creating optimal code, and the world is a better place for all." We're all about the greater good, you know. How does ObjectMeter work? Well, it's actually really neat! It involves tiramisu, the Cirque du Soleil, and golden labrador puppies! Ok, so it doesn't. You people are real sticklers for "facts". Sigh. ObjectMeter is basically an easy way to track and solve common memory management coding mistakes. Developers need to be certain that memory is not being used by objects that no longer need it. After an object has served its function, it should be disposed of so that memory is not being leaked. When an object is not correctly detached from the application, or "de-allocated", memory space is wasted and the application can become super slow and/or crash. Which really honks off your users, right? OmniObjectMeter to the rescue! It's an effective way to way to sniff out those memory leaks, multiply deallocated objects, and improve the application's performance. Rather than searching through thousands of objects in a system (lame!), developers can use ObjectMeter to quickly seek and destroy the problematic code. Complex and time consuming code review can be done in minutes (cool!) with OmniObjectMeter - which means you can spend time fixing problems rather than looking for them. Then, hey - take a load off. Go watch The Simpsons. Relax. ObjectMeter in action User Martin-Gilles Lavoie is working on an SQL/Cocoa -based inventory management software for his wife's online boutique (www.esplumoir.com). He wrote us recently about using ObjectMeter to find a pesky crash-on-quit bug. "After some fiddling around in what looked like a very tedious analysis job looking at the thousands of objects allocated by the system (it's quite scary how many objects the runtime causes an app to create), I found the zombie mode switch in ObjectMeter. One single run of my app from that point on let me find my problem. Fixed it in no time (thanks to your PB plug-in, it was a fast open job), and I was up and running in less than a minute with a problem-free application." Problem-free, folks. Features that will be interesting IF you are a developer Um, because otherwise, this stuff might sound kinda boring (allocation shmallocation). But you have to trust me that it's actually very useful and cool. Go tell your developer friends about ObjectMeter! Run! Ok, for the rest of you: ? ObjectMeter can help find leaks by showing allocated blocks, allocation events for each block, and the stack trace responsible for each allocation event. In the case of Cocoa or CoreFoundation objects, ObjectMeter also allows you to easily match retain events with their corresponding release events -- once you have done this for a leaked object, there will be some number of extra retain events left unmatched which are causing the leak. ? If you accidentally keep a pointer to a deallocated Cocoa object (which includes many CoreFoundation objects), and you later use that object, you can crash. ObjectMeter integrates nicely with the built-in Cocoa support for detecting these so-called 'zombie' objects. By flipping a switch in ObjectMeter you can detect the first message to a zombie object and can look at the allocation event history for that object to determine why the object was prematurely deallocated. ? ObjectMeter is also useful for optimizing memory usage. Since ObjectMeter shows you allocated memory split up by category, you can see how much memory each category is using. ObjectMeter can display the memory allocation events (or any other event type) for a category in a hierarchical tree formed from the stack trace responsible for each event. This allows you to see what portion of your code is responsible for what portion of the category's allocation usage - which makes it easy to identify and fix problem spots. ? CPU utilization can be improved by reducing the number of needless allocation events. ObjectMeter can remember allocation event information for deallocated objects on a category-by-category basis. Using this, a developer can look at what code was responsible for allocating and deallocating a group of objects. If the allocation and deallocation happen near each other in time, often the object really shouldn't have been deallocated anyway. ObjectMeter allows you to easily find these situations. ? ObjectMeter also has nice integration with Apple's Project Builder IDE. Any place that a stack frame is displayed in OOM, a source icon will appear next to the frame if appropriate debugging information is available in the application. Clicking on the icon will open the right source file and select the correct line. So, what's the damage? ObjectMeter is available for $149.95. We think you'll find it's worth every penny - we even give you 30 days to agree with us. OmniObjectMeter - it's an essential part of any Cocoa developer's toolbox. We built it for US, so it's gotta be cool. To download OmniObjectMeter, visit http://www.omnigroup.com/developer/omniobjectmeter/. To purchase licenses, visit http://www.omnigroup.com/store, email us at sales@omnigroup.com, or call us at one of the phone numbers below. The Omni Group 2707 NE Blakeley St Seattle WA 98105 www.omnigroup.com 800-315-OMNI 206-523-4152 Questions? Comments? Rants and/or Raves? Let us know at marketing@omnigroup.com. +++ To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change your settings, use the following link: http://www.omnigroup.com/company/omninews/ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 7376 bytes Desc: not available Url : /mailman/archive/omninews/attachments/20020507/13e44e2a/attachment.bin From linda at omnigroup.com Fri May 10 13:45:01 2002 From: linda at omnigroup.com (Linda Sharps) Date: Thu Nov 3 13:04:59 2005 Subject: Omni Wins Two Apple Design Awards Message-ID: <7F4F147B-6456-11D6-A875-00050237CCE1@omnigroup.com> This Just In! Omni Wins Two Apple Design Awards! Whoo hoo! May 10, 2002 Official press release at: http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/archive/omni- press/2002-May/000019.html Just a short message to give you some Breaking News: Yesterday at WWDC in San Jose it was announced that OmniGraffle 2.0 won awards for Best Mac OS X Technology Adoption and Best Mac OS X User Experience. How cool is Omni? We're so excited! I can't stop using using exclamation points! Seriously, it is a huge honor and we couldn't be more pleased. According to the Apple website: The Seventh Annual Apple Design Awards recognize innovation, advanced Mac OS X look and feel, use of Apple technologies in developers' Mac OS X-based products, and new, exciting, and high quality product entries to the Mac OS X market. I mean, this is a prestigious award. It's not like "Best Collection of Dill Pickle Flavored Potato Chips in a Snack Area" which we clearly could have also won, but that would have been WAY less impressive. So. Not to BRAG or anything, but if you include the two Design Awards we received last year for OmniWeb, we have won more Design Awards than any other company. And our consulting division (way to go Tom, Andrew, and Len!) also got a big old pat on the back this year because they were the developers of STX, published by Salon Transcripts, which was the Runner-up for Best Mac OS X User Experience. I'm telling you. Omni and OS X - we're a winning team. Other 2002 kick-butt award recipients include: Best New Mac OS X Product: Toon Boom Studio 1.1, The Toon Boom Most Innovative Mac OS X Product: Watson 1.5, Karelia Software, LLC Best Mac OS X Open Source Port: Winner: TeXShop 1.19, Richard Koch, Mathematics Department, University of Oregon Best Mac OS X Student Product: MacJournal 2.1, Dan Schimpf http://developer.apple.com/designawards/winners.html From linda at omnigroup.com Thu May 16 11:40:02 2002 From: linda at omnigroup.com (Linda Sharps) Date: Thu Nov 3 13:04:59 2005 Subject: OmniNews - Issue #1 Message-ID: OMNINEWSLETTER 1.0 www.omnigroup.com - 5/16 Issue #1 WHAT'S NEW ---------------------------------------------------------------+ This newsletter, for starters. We've used this mailing list in the past to send out announcements about our product releases, beta updates, etc. And that was all fine and good, except, let's face it, they were really kind of boring and lame. You know? Except for the last few. I mean, those were pretty cool, right? *cough* It seemed to us that we could make a fun snarky little newsletter that shared some of our many user comments, tips and tricks, new product info, and hot Omni gossip. So we did! Here it is! Ta-da! (Dramatic music swells) Aaaanyway, we plan to send these out every couple weeks, or as often as our president Wil can come up with bad jokes and obscure dorky NeXT references. Well..on second thought, definitely no more than every couple weeks. NEW GRAFFLE 2.0 STUFF ---------------------------------------------------------------+ You DID know we released Graffle 2.0 on April 1st, right? Did you know it won TWO Apple Design Awards last week? Well, have you downloaded it yet? If not, you're missing out on some great new features like layers, and AppleScript support, and new export options, and - WHAT, are you CRAZY? Just go here http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/download/ RIGHT NOW, and get yourself all hooked up. Yeah, now you're cookin' with gas. If you didn't know already, all this stuff is new to 2.0: ? New Palettes - Office Layout and Network ? AppleScripts can now be attached to diagram objects; they execute when the object is clicked. ? Hyperlinks can now be attached to objects; address is handed off to user's default browser when object is clicked. ? Magnets can now be added to shapes. ? Layers, layers, layers! ? New export format: HTML Image Map. ? Auto-layout improvements: 10x speed improvement for force-directed layout (not including display time). ? Added optional magnetic alignment fields. - lines will tend to align themselves in the direction of the field. - linear fields are can be at any angle. - radial fields radiate outwards from a point that can be user set. GRAFFLE TECHNICAL MUMBO JUMBO ---------------------------------------------------------------+ Propeller heads - if you are a geeky developer like the guys *I* work with (seriously, there can be such a thing as loving Star Wars a little TOO much, you know?), you will definitely be interested in knowing that we went and added some cool features to OmniGraffle that will make your programming lives easier. Aren't we just peachy that way? ? Project Builder / Framework Import : you can drag in a Cocoa project or framework to automatically create a class hierarchy diagram with clickable links to header files. ? AppleScript Everywhere : use OmniGraffle as an interface for tasks like bug tracking and scheduling. Attach scripts to graphics to make interactive documents; import and layout data from scriptable applications like FileMaker. USER THAT GETS A GOLD STAR ---------------------------------------------------------------+ OmniGraffle in action: mapping out a website. Graffle user James Spahr of Designweenie.com was looking for a way to visualize web traffic patterns. He used Graffle's Applescript support to write a script that pulled information from his webserver logs, then displayed the data as a graphical drawing. How cool is that? Check it out: http://www.designweenie.com/content.php/mappingWithGraffle01.php DID YOU KNOW? ---------------------------------------------------------------+ Obviously if you are a licensed user of OmniGraffle, you are indeed a fine upstanding citizen. For those about to rock, we at Omni salute you. But did you know that even if you haven't seen the light, you can use a free version of Graffle to view, print, and save any Graffle document? We just make it so you can't use more than twenty items. We are so goshdarn reasonable it gives our marketing weasel fits. (Note: the term "weasel" has been used in a joshing, self-deprecatory manner, and is not intended to slander the good name of the Mustela genus.) MMM...CHOCK FULL OF PALETTE GOODNESS ---------------------------------------------------------------+ We're basically violating all kinds of high school regulations by forcing our graphics intern Mike to slave night and day making new palettes. Poor guy - he walks around the office mumbling about network diagrams and sobbing quietly to himself. Our recent Maps palette, available at http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/extras/, provides you with a collection of commonly recognized icons like roads, street signs, houses, stop lights - everything you need to make the snazziest darn map EVER. If anyone gets lost on the way to your next party, it sure as heck won't be your fault. (Unless you make a map that sends people to a Wal-Mart parking lot or something. Heh. That would be mean.) New, FREE palletes will be posted every couple weeks or so, until Mike goes completely insane. Don't forget to send in your suggestions - it's like having your very own Palette Monkey working for you. HEY, WHAT ABOUT OTHER OMNI PRODUCTS? ---------------------------------------------------------------+ OmniWeb 4.1 is still in beta, but it's been doing really well. We zapped a few crasher bugs recently that stabilized the heck out of things (Bad OmniWeb! No biscuit!). Our next newsletter will focus more on OmniWeb and highlight a few neat features you may not have known about. OmniOutliner 2.0, as you may know, shipped on 5/6 - we've been getting some great user comments, and some press reviews like this one: http://www.hubblemac.com/reviews/software/packaged/liner2pg1.html . Go OmniOutliner, the Little App That Could! And last but not least, OmniObjectMeter 2.0 also shipped on 5/6. If you're the developer type, you need to check out this product. ObjectMeter is basically an easy way to track and solve common memory management coding mistakes, saving you heaps of time that you could spend, say, whipping up a nice irish coffee or something. FEEL THE LOVE ---------------------------------------------------------------+ As always, thanks for supporting Omni. We're out there to make cool software, have fun - and maybe make a buck or two. In that order. ? Please email me (linda@omnigroup.com) with any suggestions for upcoming newsletter material: product tips, lame jokes- hey, it's all good. To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change your settings, use the following link: http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/omninews From linda at omnigroup.com Fri May 31 10:27:01 2002 From: linda at omnigroup.com (Linda Sharps) Date: Thu Nov 3 13:04:59 2005 Subject: Omni News - Issue #2 Message-ID: <9BBA66A4-74BA-11D6-92B3-00050237CCE1@omnigroup.com> OmniNewsletter 1.01 www.omnigroup.com - 5/31/02 Issue #2 WHAT'S NEW -------------------------------------------------------+ We made a couple small updates to both OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner...like adding a WHOLE OTHER LANGUAGE. We took all these night classes, and watched a ton of Kurosawa movies and presto! - Japanese localization. Of course, if that were true, it would be the worst.localization.ever and we would be hated and ostrasized by an *entire country* . In reality, the extremely professional and timely localization job was done by one of our fabulous frequent collaborators, Joshua Done. Nicely "Done", Joshua! (Har!) You can read the official press release here: http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/archive/omni-press/2002-May/000021.html DID YOU KNOW? -------------------------------------------------------+ In honor of the imminent release of OmniWeb 4.1 (soon! very very soon!), I thought I'd go over some neat browser features you may not have been aware of. I mean, you already know that OmniWeb is the only shipping browser that uses Mac OS X's Quartz graphics engine to produce that super cool looking smooth text, and the only browser truly designed around the Aqua user interface. Right? You knew that, right? Oh my gosh, I sure hope you did, or our evil propaganda strategy has not worked AT ALL. PRIVACY There are some really handy OmniWeb ad-filtering features you might want to take advantage of. You know that wireless camera ad? The one that seems vaguely disturbing and is always leaping out at you from sites that should know better darnit? If you would like to avoid seeing those annoying popup ads, simply go to Preferences/Javascript. It will ask you if scripts should open new windows always, never, or only in response to a link being clicked (like viewing larger images in online catalogs, for instance). You've got control! You can also go to Preferences/Privacy to filter out banner ads and manage how websites can track you using cookies. HISTORY SEARCH If you're like me, you might do a search for some fabulous tropical vacation (although clearly not during office hours *ahem*), and stumble across a page listing all kinds of great deals. Awesome, you think, I'll have to remember this. But clearly your brain is made from circus peanut candy material, because you instantly forget everything about it. Page title, URL, you don't have a clue. In OmniWeb, you can search your History using a specific word or phrase from your original search ("clear blue water sunny beaches really strong daiquiries"), and unearth those forgotten pages. SOURCE EDITOR Looking for some killer web design tools? Ones that actually help you create great HTML without gunking it all up with a bunch of wonky code? Check out OmniWeb's Source Editor, that allows you to edit HTML, automatically format it, redisplay it, and store it back to the server. Even *I* can use it, the Queen of Bad Wysiwyg Editors. The great thing is that you can see your changes immediately - no need to upload the whole page complete with graphics to find that embarrassing typo. BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE There actually is more, like a powerful feature called Shortcuts that lets you specify shorthand that you can type into the location bar and have expanded into a full blown URL when you hit return, a built-in spell checker that works in all web forms, and my personal favorite - the "Open link behind window" option. OmniWeb - not just a pretty face. NEW OMNIGRAFFLE PALETTE POSTED -------------------------------------------------------+ "Tired of those bland looking chemical reaction diagrams?" I know *I* am. SICK AND TIRED OF THEM, actually. The blandness..the horror! Oh, anyway. We have this brand spankin' new Periodic Table palette for Graffle posted here: http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/extras/. According to some Omni propeller head, "Each element in the table has a magnet count equivalent to its valence so you can easily create bonds between elements. This palette contains elements 1 through 118, each with identifying colors." Did you know "valence" is the combining capacity of an atom or radical determined by the number of electrons that it will lose, add, or share when it reacts with other atoms? Please use this information only for good, not evil. UNSOLICITED USER LOVE -------------------------------------------------------+ Check out how an Omni fan used our products as a production environment: Michael J. Yacavone, President of XeniumGroup, recently wrote: "Last week I completed a 60 page proposal that was completely written in OmniOutliner. Over a period of three weeks I kept it open all day and added thoughts as they arose, and over six days used it for more than 8 hours a day in writing. It was an absolute joy to use. Easy to restructure items, reliable, good export features, nice spell check features. OmniGraffle was used to produce 7 diagrams (business process stuff) that were easy to edit, look great with auto drop shadow, and placed perfectly as PDF exports. The defaults are perfect. This $60 app saved tens of hours screwing around in Illustrator, and I've never liked any of the other flowchart programs on the Mac. On the whole, this production setup, OmniOutliner for writing, OmniGraffle for diagrams, InDesign for layout, all on OS X, is the best, smoothest, and most stable system I've ever used." You too can be this happy! Call now! Operators are standing by! Sure, the 'operators' might *look* like office cats, but despite their baleful glares they are ready to take your order at http://store.omnigroup.com/. THANK YOU, THANK YOU VERY MUCH -------------------------------------------------------+ As always, thanks for supporting Omni. Please email me (linda@omnigroup.com) with comments, suggestions, recipes, or movie recommendations. To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change your settings, use the following link: http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/omninews From linda at omnigroup.com Fri Jun 21 16:42:01 2002 From: linda at omnigroup.com (Linda Sharps) Date: Thu Nov 3 13:04:59 2005 Subject: OmniNews - Issue #3 Message-ID: <0E3CCFE1-856F-11D6-B596-00050237CCE1@omnigroup.com> OmniNewsletter 1.03 www.omnigroup.com -6/21/02 Issue #3 Hi folks! It's been a couple weeks - SURELY you have been sitting on the edge of your chair, peeking hopefully into your mailbox every few minutes...breathlessly waiting for another dispatch from The Omni Group! Right? Right? Um. WHAT'S NEW -------------------------------------------------------+ We've been making our Palette Monkey, Mike, work on marketing materials lately (bwah ha ha ha!), so the poor lad has been run ragged. Valiantly, he managed to produce a new palette this week before slumping into a coma. For you engineer types, you'll no doubt rub your hands briskly together and cackle with glee over our new Electronics palette - drag and drop resistors, op-amps and photodiodes (and many other frequently used circuit components) to your heart's delight. Me, I think we should do a fun Magnetic Poetry palette...but noooooo, people want them to be all "useful" and stuff. As always, you can grab a free palette here: http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/extras/ DID YOU KNOW? -------------------------------------------------------+ That in addition to the marvy products that we develop, Omni also does consulting work porting games to Mac OS X? We've done Giants: Citizen Kabuto, Quake III Arena, Oni, and more. We recently sealed the deal with MacPlay to port five more games to Mac OS X: Solider of Fortune II: Double Helix, Freedom Force, Fallout, and Incoming. As with our previous ports, we've added a couple of our own tweaks to the games: Fallout Features ? Rewritten for OS X. It's faster, more stable, and just plain cooler than the original Mac OS 7/8 version. For example, you can now use Cmd-H to hide the game if the boss drops by while you're busy wasting Raiders. ? Based on Fallout 1.2. The old Mac port only made it to 1.1, so this version fixes several in-game issues. Incoming Features ? This is the first version of Incoming to use OpenGL and Hardware Transform & Lighting. It's fast. ? Supports gamepads via the HID Manager. More info here: http://www.omnigroup.com/games/ TIPS & TRICKS -------------------------------------------------------+ "Tips and tricks" sounds profoundly lame, I know. It just seemed like this wouldn't be a real newsletter without using that term. Hey OmniOutliner folks - are you secretly jealous of those uber-cool power users that have handy keyboard shortcuts for everything, so that their mouse actually has a visible layer of dust? I know *I* am! And with that ridiculous segue, let me tell you about some cool shortcuts in Outliner: Navigating: You can use the up and down arrows to jump between rows when you are editing text. The left and right arrow keys will move the cursor to the previous or next cell when it's positioned at the edge of a cell. Creating Rows: To create a new row under the current one, simply press Return; to create a new row above the current one, use Shift+Return. Indenting Rows: If you outline only has one column, use Tab and Shift+Tab to indent and outdent the current row. In multi-column mode, this key normally moves the cursor between cells, although this can be changed under Preferences. Editing: If you have a row selected and you want to type in its cell, press the E key. When you're done typing and want to go back to row-selection mode, press the Escape key. More info on OmniOutliner is here: http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnioutliner/ VISIT OMNI AT MACWORLD -------------------------------------------------------+ Most people view us Omni employees as elusive and cloaked in mystery, just like superheros. Oh yeah, we get that all the time (cough). If you're attending MacWorld NY in July, and you'd like to shatter your illusion of the Omni team consisting of Spandex-wearing, steel-bending, arch-enemy riddled weirdos (only a few of us fall under that category), please do come by our booth and say hi. We're stationed at booth 1657, across from the Internet Cafe. UNSOLICITED USER LOVE -------------------------------------------------------+ Check out how an Omni fan used OmniGraffle to wow his professor: Michael Ehrlichman is taking an "Abstract Data Structures with C++" class at Colorado Technical University. He writes, --- "I've been using OmniGraffle for a day now and am completely and utterly amazed. At work, I use Microsoft Visio. OmniGraffle trumps Visio hands down. Absolutely no comparison! (Not to mention it costs an arm and leg LESS than Visio.) I've been using Graffle to diagram BST traversals and the like. My professor (who doesn't understand how I can program C++ on a Mac) is absolutely stunned by the diagrams I've created using Graffle." --- Amazed! Stunned! These terms could apply to YOU, too, so rush right over to http://store.omnigroup.com/! THANK YOU, THANK YOU VERY MUCH -------------------------------------------------------+ As always, thanks for supporting Omni. Please email me (linda@omnigroup.com) with comments, suggestions, summer reading recommendations, or tropical cocktail recipes. To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change your settings, use the following link: http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/omninews From linda at omnigroup.com Mon Jun 24 18:19:04 2002 From: linda at omnigroup.com (Linda Sharps) Date: Thu Nov 3 13:04:59 2005 Subject: The Omni Group Ships OmniWeb 4.1 Message-ID: <3989F38E-87D9-11D6-BC65-00050237CCE1@omnigroup.com> I know, I know. You just got that annoyingly chirpy newsletter, and now you see yet *another* email from me, and you're thinking - GAACK! SPAM! Well, you're dead wrong, buster. Because I just know you'll be excited for us when I tell you that we finally shipped OmniWeb 4.1 today. I mean, we've been working on this release since dinosaurs roamed the earth...since Kevin Costner made a decent movie, darn it. No, it just feels that way. So make us happy, and check out the new version - now with more Webby Goodness! http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/ ---- The Dreary Press Release: http://www.omnigroup.com/company/news/ Mac OS X Developers The Omni Group Announce New Version of Premier Web Browser, OmniWeb 4.1 Increases support for web standards, improves user experience Seattle, Washington -- June 24, 2002 -- The Omni Group, developers of Mac OS X applications and game ports, announce the latest version of OmniWeb, the only web browser built specifically for Mac OS X. OmniWeb uses Mac OS X's graphics engine to produce great looking smooth text that looks like a printed page, takes full advantage of multiple processors for extra speed, and is truly designed around the Aqua user interface, with drawers, sheets, customizable toolbars and more. OmniWeb provides a wide array of unique browsing features: the ability to disable JavaScript popup windows, flexible cookie preferences, bookmarks that can check themselves for updates, a source view window that can edit as well as display source, very customizable ad-filtering preferences, and a powerful feature called Shortcuts which lets you visit favorite web pages, do search engine queries, and other handy tasks using just a few keystrokes in the address bar. OmniWeb also has an intuitive History search that allows users to search their browsing history by text, rather than by URL or page title, and a built-in spell checker that works in all web forms. "We've put a lot of thought into improving the way people interact with their web browsers, and I think it shows. In this point release we've greatly improved the downloads interface, added speech recognition, improved keyboard navigation - and, of course, made everything faster," said Ken Case, Chairman of The Omni Group and OmniWeb Lead Engineer. "Our users have been telling us that they love OmniWeb's interface and just wish it rendered every page they visit so they can use it 100% of the time, so most of our effort over the last year has been spent improving our support for plug-ins (including Flash 6), Java, CSS, and JavaScript. We haven't yet reached our ultimate compatibility goals for OmniWeb (such as complete support for all W3C-endorsed web standards), but in the last year we've made significant progress toward that end." "OmniWeb has around half a million users right now, and this release is for them," added Wil Shipley, President of The Omni Group. "Our share of the browser market has been steadily increasing since Mac OS X started shipping, because OmniWeb is the only browser designed for Mac OS X exclusively. For example, OmniWeb uses sub-pixel positioning to render text, so web pages look like printed pages. Mac people notice the difference." More information and a free trial download are available at http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/. New Features since 4.0: Increased Compatibility: ? Greatly improved Java support ? Improved JavaScript support ? Improved CSS support ? 'Compatibility' settings which allow you to masquerade as a different web browser for gaining access to websites that restrict users based on browser ? Support for Netscape-style browser plugins including Macromedia's Flash 6 browser plugin. ? Many browser plugins, Flash included, perform better in OmniWeb than other browsers since we give them dedicated processing time Easier to use ? Improved preferences interface ? Software Update built in which notifies you when new versions of OmniWeb are available ? 'Send Feedback' Item in Help menu allows user to easily send us feedback email ? Integration with the Dock to display the number of updated bookmarks overlayed on the dock icon ? Improved downloads window System Improvements ? Speech Recognition allows you to surf the web and perform many operations in OmniWeb using voice commands ? OmniWeb honors your System preferences for proxy servers ? OmniWeb ships localized into 17 languages; new to 4.1 is support for Greek, Icelandic, Korean, Portugese & Brazilian Portugese, and Russian ? OmniWeb now features support for AppleScript allowing users to script the application as well as providing support for third-party bookmark and history managers such as URL Manager Pro OmniWeb 4.1 Licensing and Pricing OmniWeb 4.1 can be downloaded as a free trial. An OmniWeb 4.1 license retails for $29.95. OmniWeb can be downloaded here: http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/download/ About The Omni Group: The Omni Group, founded in 1993, develops Mac OS X applications and ports games to OS X. The Omni Group has produced OmniWeb, the only web browser built specifically for Mac OS X, and the winner of two 2001 Apple Design Awards. The Omni Group also is the developer of OmniGraffle, a diagramming program that won two 2002 Apple Design Awards, and OmniOutliner, an outlining and organizational tool. OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner have been bundled on Power Macs and PowerBooks since January 2002. The Omni Group is located in Seattle, WA. More information on The Omni Group is available at www.omnigroup.com. To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change your settings, use the following link: http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/omninews From linda at omnigroup.com Mon Jul 15 17:48:01 2002 From: linda at omnigroup.com (Linda Sharps) Date: Thu Nov 3 13:04:59 2005 Subject: OmniNews - Issue #4 Message-ID: <7C16B55A-9854-11D6-A89E-00050237CCE1@omnigroup.com> OmniNewsletter 1.04 www.omnigroup.com -7/15/02 Issue #4 Hello again! It's me, your friendly neighborhood marketing weasel, with yet another delightful missive rich in literary merit and most assuredly NOT a cheap method of hawking our products. I'm reporting from the trenches of Pre-Tradeshow Hades. The office cats are all freaked out because we have boxes literally everywhere, ready to be sent to MacWorld Expo. The engineers are freaked out, too, from the unexpected amount of chaos cluttering up their logical universe (although, dang, you should SEE some of their offices). They don't have puffed up tails like the cats, though. I mean, *most* of them don't. So hey - if you're going to the show, plan on swinging by booth #1657 to say hi. I'll be the one with the glazed eyes, muttering incoherently about shipping deadlines and New York tax forms. WHAT'S NEW -------------------------------------------------------+ Ehh....jeez, not much. 'Sup with you? No, let's see, I know we've got SOME news. Both OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle got a 4-mouse review in MacWorld magazine, how's that? We love us some mousies. Our Palette Monkey, Mike, also added some new machines to the Network palette. Yeah, hoop-de-do. But if you needed to drop an eMac into a diagram and were sitting around all despondent, your troubles are over, my friend. And there's a *hidden item* in the Network palette I just found out about - the first person to tell me what it is gets a free copy of either Graffle, OmniWeb, or OmniOutliner - your pick. There's also a new palette available at http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/extras/ - the (drum roll, please)....Toy Brick Palette! This one is fun, people. Build something cool and send it to me! SALE! ALL PRODUCTS MUST GO! -------------------------------------------------------+ So I have yet another compelling reason to come by our booth next week (other than to bask in our warm glowing warming glow) - we're offering special show pricing. That means you can snarf up OmniWeb or OmniOutliner for $25.00, and OmniGraffle for $50.00. It won't last long, so ACT NOW! These prices are RED HOT! But WAIT there's MORE! Apparently I am channeling the GINSU KNIFE SALES GUY! If you buy all 3, you get a) our undying love and affection, and b) a free app! We're tossing in a free copy of OmniDiskSweeper as a little thank you for getting all wacky on us and buying all of our products. DISKSWEEPER? WHA? -------------------------------------------------------+ OmniDiskSweeper is our Mac OS X utility for quickly finding and deleting big, honking useless files and thus making space on your hard disks. DiskSweeper makes this super easy by highlighting the biggest files on your disks, and by noting which files are used by the system, so you don't accidentally delete important files. When you start OmniDiskSweeper, it presents you with a list of disks attached to your machine. Double-click on one, and a new window opens with a "column" view listing every folder and file on that disk, which it sorts by size as you watch. You then simply browse through the folders and files and delete the large ones which you are no longer using. If a file is being used by the system, it'll say so on the panel, so you won't accidentally delete something that would make your system stop working (D'OH!). The free space on the disk and the ordering of the folders are automatically recalculated. If you aren't sure what's in a file, you can open it by double-clicking on its icon or dragging its icon onto another application. "But Omni, this sounds basically like what the Finder does", you may say. O, ye of little faith. DiskSweeper is actually WAY more useful for cleaning up your hard disks. Since the directories and files are sorted by size, you get to quickly zoom in on the big files that are taking up all the space and not worry about the thousands of tiny ones that aren't hurting anyone. It's fast, it's easy, it's just a *shockingly* handy tool. We'll be selling DiskSweeper for a measly ten bucks from our MacWorld booth (and giving it away, too, as I mentioned) - or you could always swing by our online store at http://store.omnigroup.com. THANK YOU, THANK YOU VERY MUCH -------------------------------------------------------+ As always, thanks for supporting Omni. There will be more actual news next time, I swear. Please email me (linda@omnigroup.com) with comments, suggestions, sangria variants, or "What I Did This Summer" essays. To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change your settings, use the following link: http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/omninews From linda at omnigroup.com Wed Jul 24 11:46:02 2002 From: linda at omnigroup.com (Linda Sharps) Date: Thu Nov 3 13:04:59 2005 Subject: Special pricing on our apps! Whoo hoo! Message-ID: <3D33342A-9F2A-11D6-B1BC-00050237CCE1@omnigroup.com> Hi folks, Just a quick note from me this time...I know, it's heartbreaking, but never fear - a newsletter will be coming soon with zany MacWorld stories, Mike the Palette Monkey, and more. Since SO many of you stamped your feet and threatened to hold your breath unless we offered *everyone* our extra-special MacWorld pricing, we had a Very Important Executive Meeting ("Andrew! Can you make the store, like, cheaper?" "Yeah.") and decided to lower prices this Wed - Fri on https://store.omnigroup.com. Lowered prices, folks! Less moola, more boola! I don't know what that means either! Anywhoo, we're only doing this for July 24, 25, and 26 - no matter HOW much foot-stamping goes on. Now's your chance! -Linda -------- The Dreary Press Release: Mac OS X Developers The Omni Group Offer Special Post-MacWorld Pricing From Online Store July 24-26: Reduced Pricing for OmniGraffle, OmniWeb, OmniOutliner, and OmniDiskSweeper Seattle, Washington -- July 24, 2002 -- The Omni Group, developers of Mac OS X applications OmniWeb, OmniOutliner, OmniGraffle, and OmniDiskSweeper, announce plans to offer reduced prices for software licenses sold from https://store.omnigroup.com. The decision to hold the Wed ? Friday sale was made in part because of overwhelming demand from Mac OS X fans not able to attend MacWorld last week, where The Omni Group had offered special pricing for attendees. Customers that visit The Omni Group?s online store from July 24 ? 26 will have the following prices available for software licenses: OmniWeb: $25.00 (normally $29.95) OmniOutliner: $25.00 (normally $29.95) OmniGraffle: $50.00 (normally $59.95) OmniDiskSweeper: $10.00 (normally $14.92) Omni Productivity Bundle with all four of the above: $100.00 (individually they would total $134.77) Education pricing will also be offered. About OmniWeb: OmniWeb uses Mac OS X's graphics engine to produce great looking smooth text that looks like a printed page, takes full advantage of multiple processors for extra speed, and is truly designed around the Aqua user interface, with drawers, sheets, customizable toolbars and more. OmniWeb also provides a wide array of unique browsing features: the ability to disable JavaScript popup windows, flexible cookie preferences, bookmarks that can check themselves for updates, a source view window that can edit as well as display source, very customizable ad-filtering preferences, and a history search. About OmniGraffle: OmniGraffle helps users draw out anything that can be represented by symbols and lines: flow charts, org charts, network diagrams, family trees, project processes, office layouts, and much more. OmniGraffle can also be used for nontraditional diagramming purposes like charting storylines or planning events. With efficient tools like 'smart' shape magnets and detailed control palettes, OmniGraffle provides a comprehensive feature set with a remarkably easy to use interface. About OmniOutliner: OmniOutliner is a program for outlining and organizing information. OmniOutliner 2.0 uses intuitive commands and collapsible groups to help users maintain multiple to-do lists, create agendas, manage tasks, track expenses, write legal briefs, take meeting notes, monitor project status - and much more. OmniOutliner is the perfect application for anyone who wants to gather together bits of information and impose some sort of order upon them. Like all Omni products, OmniOutliner 2.0 leverages powerful Aqua features to provide a seamless OS X experience with an easy to use interface. About OmniDiskSweeper OmniDiskSweeper is a Mac OS X utility for quickly finding and deleting big, useless files and thus making space on your hard disks. OmniDiskSweeper makes this easy by highlighting the biggest files on your disks, and by noting which files are used by the system, so you don't accidentally delete important files. About The Omni Group: The OmniGroup, founded in 1993, develops Mac OS X applications and ports games to OS X. The OmniGroup has produced OmniWeb, the only web browser built specifically for Mac OS X, and the winner of two 2001 Apple Design Awards. The Omni Group also is the developer of OmniGraffle, a diagramming program that won two 2002 Apple Design Awards, and OmniOutliner, an outlining and organizational tool. OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner have been bundled on Power Macs and PowerBooks since January 2002. The OmniGroup is located in Seattle, WA. More information on The Omni Group is available at www.omnigroup.com. From linda at omnigroup.com Fri Aug 2 16:02:06 2002 From: linda at omnigroup.com (Linda Sharps) Date: Thu Nov 3 13:04:59 2005 Subject: OmniNews - Issue #5 Message-ID: OmniNewsletter 1.05 www.omnigroup.com - 8/02/02 Issue #5 Summer greetings from your favorite Omni marketing weasel! The weather is beautiful and warm here in Seattle, and right now we've got the Blue Angels roaring overheard for Seafair. All is good. Also, it's Friday! w00t! We survived Macworld, and managed to have an excellent time, despite the sweltering humidity that some of us Northwest folk found a little...eh, moist. Highlights: * Saw RENT! Fabulous! * Our booth was jam-packed almost the whole time! * Sales were brisk, and we got great feedback on our new boxes! Lowlights: * Oh, the hurting - the hurting of the feet. * Javits Center: chronically short of cabs. Thanks to those of you who came by the booth, *especially* those who told me you liked the newsletter. You made my day! WHAT'S NEW -------------------------------------------------------+ Starting Monday, we're going to offer a special "productivity bundle" (named as such because we COULD NOT think of anything better, ok?) on the online store. We got enough positive feedback from the post-Macworld sale that we figured we'd continue offering a special price for those of you who want to own multiple Omni apps. "Why, whatever sort of enticing deal have you cooked up this time, O Marketing Weasel", you may be pleading, ever-so-endearingly, "Please, oh please, tell me about this undoubtedly *frabjous* promotional price!" Well, if you buy the bundle on https://store.omnigroup.com for $109.95 - you get OmniWeb, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, AND OmniDiskSweeper. Separately they would total $134.77. (Thundering applause) Thank you! I'll be here all week! ACTUAL EMAIL FROM ACTUAL OMNI EMPLOYEE -------------------------------------------------------+ New to the Omni newsletter! The inside scoop on some of the high level, strategic subjects we discuss. From: one of our marvelous support guys Date: Wed Jul 31, 2002 09:51:47 PM US/Pacific To: everyone Subject: Room behind the hockey table "So, I spent some time straightening up down there this evening, and I discovered another large quantity of cat poo in one of the corners while I was doing so. I've placed a sign on the door to remind us, but let's always leave that door closed. Always, always, always." TIPS & TRICKS -------------------------------------------------------+ I am filled with sorrow (well, currently, sorrow and Diet Coke) to have to say, there are no new Graffle palettes for you just yet. Mike the Palette Monkey was sedated and carried away last week after he was found curled under his desk, babbling about Japanese maples and ornamental grasses. We think he may have been working on a garden palette. At any rate, we should have something new any day now, just as soon as he retains his motor skills. So for this newsletter, I'll tell you how to make your OWN darn palettes. Creating a new palette: First of all, I just want to say, the more you type the word "palette", the weirder it looks. That troubling item aside, select Tools>Palettes>New Palette. Now just draw some shapes in your new window - circles, squares, downloaded photos of that dog from Frasier (you freak), it doesn't matter. Note that if you have the Palettes panel up, you can watch and even use your palette as you create it. If you want to create multi-part shapes that will get dragged out as one shape, group them together on your palette using Format>Group. Saving the palette: Save the palette wherever you like, as you would a normal document. Now whenever OmniGraffle starts up, it will add your new palette to its list of palettes. But hey - there's more, because it's not in your toolbar yet. Adding the palette to the palette toolbar: Select Tools>Customize Toolbar when the palette window is frontmost. Take a moment to consider, is "frontmost" really even a word? You should see the palette you save in the list of icons. Drag its icon onto the toolbar, and kazaam! You can now click on that icon to bring up your custom palette. Editing your palette: To make changes to your palette (you maybe rethink the whole Frasier dog thing), either click on the Edit button in the palette window's toolbar, or select Tools>Palettes>Edit Palette. This will bring up the palette as a document that can be edited and saved. Now you know, and knowing, of course, is half the battle. SOLICITED USER LOVE -------------------------------------------------------+ Ok, so usually I call this section 'unsolicited user love' - but I can't lie, Lucas had just received a free copy of Graffle so *may* have been extra glowy with praise. He was the first one to find the hidden item in the Network palette (psst - under the cloud...a wee little eMate), so congrats Lucas! Lucas Mathis writes: "Flowchart world, here I come! Fear my mighty diagramming skills! Actually, I used to hate flowchart and diagram programs. My dad used this application whose name shall not be mentioned here...it was a bore. I always drew diagrams by hand or used AppleWorks, which, needless to say, never ended up looking particularly convincing. OmniGraffle changed that. It's actually fun to put them boxes into the document and connect them and add text and move everything around until it fits. The whole thing looks beautiful on screen, and the program works very intuitively. OmniGraffle put the fun back into diagrams. Actually, maybe saying "putting back" is a bit of an overstatement since there never was any fun in diagrams before I discovered OmniGraffle." Now, when was the last time you had FUN making diagrams? Graffle: the Slinky of diagramming apps! THANK YOU, THANK YOU VERY MUCH -------------------------------------------------------+ Once again, a big thank you for your interest in Omni. Please email me (linda@omnigroup.com) with comments, suggestions, hardy full-sun flowering shrub ideas, or your personal thoughts on the whole Billy Bob-Angelina Jolie thing. To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change your settings, use the following link: http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/omninews From linda at omnigroup.com Wed Sep 4 16:22:01 2002 From: linda at omnigroup.com (Linda Sharps) Date: Thu Nov 3 13:04:59 2005 Subject: OmniNews - Issue #6 Message-ID: OmniNewsletter 1.06 www.omnigroup.com - 9/04/02 Issue #6 Oh, Labor Day weekend has passed, and thus the summer slowly fizzles to an end and all the Omni engineers put away their white sweatpants for another year. Hoo, boy. Nothing like a random antiquated clothing etiquette reference to really kick off a newsletter, don't you think? Well, how about a fun link, instead: http://www.crazyapplerumors.com. There. That's better. WHAT'S NEW -------------------------------------------------------+ (...pussycat, whoah-whoah.) We're going RETAIL, baby. We've partnered with one of the top US rep firms, Channel Sources, to make OmniWeb, OmniGraffle, and OmniOutliner available to resellers. We've also partnered with a fabulous master-distributor company called act2 to make our products available in Japan and across Europe. So, soon you should encounter our charming software boxes peering hopefully up at you from a shelf in your local computer store, begging to be taken home and loved. Don't deny them a good home! They exist to please. TIPS & TRICKS -------------------------------------------------------+ OmniWeb, unlike my '97 white Corolla, is meant to be all tricked out. It's built to be STROKED and BORED and other car-related terms from Beach Boys songs that are meaningless to me. You've got the whole popup ad blocking action, the flexible cookie management (mmm, cookie), and the bookmarks you can get all bossy with and demand that they check themselves for updates, right? Um. You *did* know OmniWeb did all that? Because - look, if you didn't, just send me an email and we'll keep this niiiice and quiet so I don't lose my marketing weasel badge. Ok then. OmniWeb also has a very powerful, handy feature called Shortcuts, that you may not have known about. Shortcuts lets you create, er, shortcuts to virtually any URL. A simple example of one of these shortcuts is included with a standard OmniWeb install. If you type apple into into the address bar, OmniWeb will open it as http://www.apple.com. Kazam! To search Google, type: google frisbee dogs into the address bar. This will open as: http://www.google.com/search?q=frisbee+dogs Then you can browse those pages and learn, among other things, all about BARF, the Bones and Raw Food diet for dogs. Alrighty, moving along to Creating Your Own Shortcuts. To edit your shortcuts, open OmniWeb's Preferences (under the OmniWeb menubar item), then select Shortcuts. Click the + button. A new shortcut is created, with the Shortcut somewhere and the Destination URL http://www.somewhere.com. Then, double click the 'somewhere' shortcut, and replace it with whatever word or letter you want. Double click the 'http://www.somewhere.com', and replace it with a URL you would like to access quickly and easily. For instance, I like the site Pop Culture Junk Mail. And so should you, really. So I put the letter P as my shortcut, and entered http://www.popculturejunkmail.com in the URL field. All I have to do is type "P" into the address bar, hit enter, and voila - PCJM will open. That's all well and good, but Shortcuts gets even COOLER. There are two symbols (@, %) that Shortcuts uses as wildcards, so you can set up a shortcut that quickly searches a website for a particular term. Let's say you want to search thesaurus.com for the word "blather", because clearly that is an appropriate term to consider right now. So here is how you can set that up: In the Shortcut column, enter whatever shortcut you want, followed by the @ sign. Let's say you use the letter "t" as your shortcut. So you would enter: Shortcut=t@ Destination URL=http://www.thesaurus.com/cgi-bin/search?config=roget&words=%@ Ok then! When you're ready to look up "blather", you just type "t blather" (without the quotes, but you probably knew that) in OmniWeb's address bar. Now you can get all high falutin' and use the word loquaciousness instead. The '@' in the shortcut tells OmniWeb you want to add extra words after you type in after 't', and the '%@' in the destination URL tells OmniWeb where to insert those extra words in the URL it generates. In the end, if you were to type "t syzygy" OmniWeb would create a URL to search Thesaurus.com that looked like "http://www.thesaurus.com/cgi-bin/search?config=roget&words=syzygy" Whew, that was long. Make sense? Clear as mud? You may want to check out a superior (and much more entertaining) description of the whole Shortcuts concept in Xenex's tutorial at http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=OmniWeb shortcuts. UNSOLICITED USER LOVE -------------------------------------------------------+ Oh, who am I kidding. It's *always* solicited, people. But the love...the love is REAL (sniff). Tod Abbott writes: "I use OmniGraffle primarily for charting Web site structure and flow. It was used specifically to chart out the complex structure of an online Contracts Management tool for the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (www.vta.org) as well as the Admin pages for that tool. I'm also using it to map the course of a new project for the U.S. EPA, Region 5 (Great Lakes). I've used Visio on Windows as well as a couple of other flow-chart tools for the Mac, and OmniGraffle beats them all in ease of use and amount of control, not to mention the gorgeous charts it produces. Another great product from The Omni Group." Aaaand here's where I dish up some hackneyed segue that allows me to provide this link: https://store.omnigroup.com. Er, I mean: "Hey! It's easy to use, gives you control, and produces gorgeous stuff! Go to our online store today!" ACTUAL EMAIL FROM ACTUAL OMNI EMPLOYEE -------------------------------------------------------+ From: Mike the Palette Monkey Date: Tue Aug 27, 2002 6:10:36 PM US/Pacific To: all of us Subject: Status Went to Jaguar 10:20 release at the Valley Fair Apple store. Can you spot me on this page? I will give you a hint, I am wearing a backpack. http://www.apple.com/retail/jaguar/ So our Graffle Palette Monkey is off running around Apple stores instead of creating new palettes. I know, it chaps MY hide too. In the meantime, as we methodically press his nose back to the grindstone, please please send in any and all palette ideas! THANK YOU, THANK YOU VERY MUCH -------------------------------------------------------+ As always, a big thank you for your interest in Omni. Please email me (linda@omnigroup.com) with comments, suggestions, best uses for fresh basil, or recommended DVD rentals. To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change your settings, use the following link: http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/omninews From linda at omnigroup.com Tue Oct 15 18:02:13 2002 From: linda at omnigroup.com (Linda Sharps) Date: Thu Nov 3 13:04:59 2005 Subject: The Omni Group and PopCap Games, sitting in a tree Message-ID: <7EDD831D-E0A1-11D6-95D4-00050237CCE1@omnigroup.com> Hello from your friendly neighborhood marketing weasel! Just a brief note today, so don't go rushing off to unsubscribe from this list, grumbling about all the boring emails you get from me. I mean, really. Where's the love? Ok, here's the scoop: we've partnered up (I sort of wanted to say "shacked up" but that would give *all kinds* of incorrect impressions) with the talented team at PopCap to port some of their super fun games to Mac OS X. Because when it comes to Mac OS X, we SO rock. -- The Official Press Release: PopCap teams up with The Omni Group to bring Deluxe games to Mac OS X Bejeweled Deluxe and Alchemy Deluxe now available; .Mac members get special deal Seattle, WA ? October 15, 2002 -- The Omni Group and PopCap Games have partnered to bring several addicting puzzle and strategy games to Mac OS X. The Omni Group, who has ported hit games like Giants: Citzen Kabuto, Fallout and Fallout 2, and Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix, will provide native Cocoa game ports for PopCap. "The quality of the user experience is?THE core?of PopCap's success.?Our move to exclusively support OS X allows us to ensure each Mac user is?having a fulfilling experience with our games. Omni?s world-class porting expertise guarantees we will?deliver fully optimized Mac games and deliver them much sooner. An important part of that quality user experience is not having to wait 'forever' for the next game from your favorite publisher and now Mac users won?t have to." - Bradley Ward, VP Licensing, PopCap Games Recently released under the partnership are the games Bejeweled Deluxe and Alchemy Deluxe. These "Deluxe" versions of PopCap's web-based games can be played offline anytime, and offer improved graphics, high-quality sound, and numerous special features. "We're very happy to be partnering with PopCap to bring their games to the Macintosh platform. The Omni Group is dedicated to bringing all great games to Mac OS X, and PopCap is focused on making games that are actually fun to play, instead of just technology demos. It's a perfect fit!" - William Shipley, President, The Omni Group Under a special promotion that runs through November, fully registered members of .Mac are eligible for a free copy of Alchemy Deluxe and a $5 discount on Bejeweled Deluxe. Trial members of .Mac can also get the $5 discount on Bejeweled Deluxe. If you're a trial .Mac member, look in your iDisk Software folder for trial versions of both games. Full .Mac members can obtain their free copy of Alchemy Deluxe from the .Mac website. Bejeweled, enjoyed by over 30 million people online and awarded ?Game of the Year? by both Computer Gaming World and Handheld Computing, is a fast paced gem-matching puzzle that will keep players coming back again and again. Players swap gems on the board to align at least three gems in a row, either horizontally or vertically, to collect points and make the collection disappear while more gems fall into place. In Alchemy, the player must transform lead into gold in an addictive, brain-tickling puzzle. You do so by placing magic runes of different shapes and colors on a grid-like playing field. Each rune must match the adjacent square's rune in color or shape - completing a row or column of squares transmutes that lead into gold. Bejeweled Deluxe and Alchemy Deluxe are each available for $19.95 from PopCap's website at www.popcap.com. Like all PopCap games, users can download and play trial versions for free and without providing any personal data before opting to register. Deluxe games for Mac OS X require an Apple Macintosh (recommend G3/400 or better) running Mac OS X v10.1 or later. PC and Palm versions of the games are also available for download from the site. Don?t have Mac OS X yet? While supplies last, carbon-based versions of Alchemy and Bejeweled are available in a boxed set for $19.99 SRP from MacPlay (www.macplay.com) or popular retailers everywhere. About PopCap Games PopCap was formed in January 2000, and is dedicated to creating simple and immersive games that everyone can enjoy. Beyond Bejeweled and Alchemy, games from PopCap include Dynomite, Seven Seas, Big Money, Atomica and Mummy Maze ? many of which are available for play on Palm, PocketPC, PC, Mac, wireless devices and online. PopCap Games is located in Seattle, WA. For more information about PopCap?s released and upcoming Mac games (or games for other platforms) please contact Bradley Ward (bradley@popcap.com). About The Omni Group The Omni Group, founded in 1993, develops Mac OS X applications and ports games to Mac OS X. The Omni Group has produced OmniWeb, the only web browser built specifically for Mac OS X, and the winner of two 2001 Apple Design Awards. The Omni Group also is the developer of OmniOutliner, an outlining and organizational tool which recently received a 4 mouse rating from MacWorld magazine, and OmniGraffle, a diagramming program that won two 2002 Apple Design Awards. The Omni Group is located in Seattle, WA. More information on The Omni Group is available at www.omnigroup.com. From linda at omnigroup.com Mon Oct 21 13:19:01 2002 From: linda at omnigroup.com (Linda Sharps) Date: Thu Nov 3 13:04:59 2005 Subject: OmniNews - Issue #7 Message-ID: OmniNewsletter 1.07 www.omnigroup.com -10/21//02 Issue #7 It's been a while since the OmniNewsletter has been tossed up on your porch, hasn't it? Well, don't look at ME like that. You think writing these is *easy*? No way. It takes hours of labor, vats of caffeine, and a crystal clear mind filled with a single purpose: to web surf as much as possible while pretending to work. WHAT'S NEW -------------------------------------------------------+ If you were at the Seattle Convention Center on Oct. 3, you were probably thinking, "Holy CRUD, my feet hurt." Well, I was thinking that, anyway. October 3rd was the Mac Business Expo, a fine exhibition and vendor showcase put on by Computer Stores Northwest. Omni had the fabulous opportunity to present twice during the keynote: we did an overview of why Mac OS X is so goshdarn great, delivered by our engaging president Wil Shipley; and a demo of our applications, presented by our outstanding Support Manager, Brian Covey. Considering both of them had only 5 minutes to talk, and successfully did it without sounding like espresso-fueled auctioneers, AND even managed to be funny and entertaining, I'm frankly...quite jealous. We sold lots of copies of OmniWeb, OmniGraffle, and OmniOutliner at the Expo, and I certainly hope that if you were there, you didn't get stuck in that insane line we saw at the Sales Pavilion. It was like everyone was waiting to see BRAD PITT, or something. NEW PALETTE AVAILABLE -------------------------------------------------------+ Mike the Palette Monkey toiled for what seems to be entire minutes on end to bring you the (collective anticipatory gasp)...CASH FLOW PALETTE! That's right, for you Scrooge McDucks out there, you can now create diagrams that show your many gold ingots! Wall Street tycoons, no need for expensive charting software for YOUR next presentation - simply use our handy "Boo, Downturn" and "Whoohoo! Upturn" arrows to explain today's complex market! In all seriousness, or at least as much as I am capable of, this is a cute palette that can help you create some basic cash flow situations. There's a piggy bank and everything. You can grab it here: http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/extras/ TIPS & TRICKS -------------------------------------------------------+ I once worked for a company that asked me to prepare a presentation that included a slide that blared "WE EAT OUR OWN DOG FOOD". I am ashamed to say I also included a clipart graphic of a dog food bowl. I'm not just telling you this because I've decided the newsletter should really be less about our products and more about me, but *also* because what that slide was (falsely, by the way) claiming was that at Company X, we actually USED our products. At Omni, it's true. Our products didn't get designed based on focus groups or market studies or smeary cocktail napkin doodles - they were built to fit the needs of our employees. And as a result, they are all super handy and have lots of useful features and are easy to use. You know, like software should be. So, veering back to the vague subject at hand, let's take a moment to marvel at the wonderfulness that is OmniOutliner, shall we? What with the organizing and the ease of us and the handiness and all. I truthfully use it every single day at work, to manage my to-do lists, track our retail sales, tally up my marketing expenses, etc. You can bump along quite happily in Outliner without doing any significant formatting, but if you want to get *jiggy* with it then take a gander at the Info panel. The Info panel allows you to changes styles, automatically number rows, and even change the way data is entered, displayed, and calculated. To keep things relatively short, I'll just focus on per-level styles. Each line in the Styles table corresponds to a level of indentation in your outline. If you select Level 1, and change the font, color, or formatting, all of your top-level items will change to match. For instance, by making first-level items use a larger font, second-level items use a slightly smaller font, and so on, you can easily call attention to the structure of your document. You can also assign numbering options to your levels. Under Numbering Type, you can choose different methods of numbering all items on the same indentation level. Need to whip up a "Harvard-style" doc? Choose "I, II, III..." for the first level, "A, B, C" for the second, "1, 2, 3" for the third, until you run out of brainy subjects to list. It's lawyer-rific! Who cares about per-level styles? You should, darn it. Once you set up your styles, you can just fire away at Outliner, typing like a mad dervish - and everything will be all neat and organized and pretty. Simple key commands let you choose your levels as you type, and Outliner slaps those styles in place like your personal formatting assistant. Do we eat our own dog food? You better believe we do, buster. UNSOLICITED USER LOVE -------------------------------------------------------+ It's not just ME that has a crush on OmniOutliner, oh no. Actual real people that have nothing to do with Omni love it too! Mr. Steven Winson writes: "Just wanted to email you guys and let you know that in the 24 hours since I received my OmniOutliner license, it has become an integral part of almost everything I do in my office and while I'm out on the job. I've never come across software that is as easy to use, and can be put to so many different uses without having to script anything." So don't dally - rush right over to our store and you too will See The Light (or Eat The Dog Food, if you prefer to think of it that way): https://store.omnigroup.com ACTUAL EMAIL FROM ACTUAL OMNI EMPLOYEE -------------------------------------------------------+ From: A support engineer Date: We