This year’s roadmap is a little different from our usual fare, because this year we’re starting to work with a whole new spatial computing platform!
Our typical roadmap reflects on the previous year, and looks forward to the year ahead. Last year, we certainly had some big news! We shipped OmniFocus 4, simplifying the app for beginners (while making it more flexible than ever for power users)—now a single universal purchase across Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch.
Much has been written, on our blog and in other places, about the OmniFocus 4 release, and if any of this is news to you, I certainly encourage reading (or watching or listening) to learn more! (Plus we just discovered that Apple has designated OmniFocus 4 as an Editors’ Choice in the App Store!)
We also started a public TestFlight of OmniGraffle 8 last year, which is very exciting and we’ve received some great feedback. We look forward to sharing more in 2024!
At the last WWDC, Apple introduced macOS 14 Sonoma, iOS 17, and iPadOS 17 (all with interactive widgets); and we worked over the summer to ensure all of our apps were compatible and ready for those operating system updates on day one.
On the infrastructure front, we upgraded the API servers for OmniFocus for the Web to run on modern Apple silicon hardware, and added support for the new features in OmniFocus 4 (such as reorderable Forecast perspectives). And while we’d occasionally offered merch before, last year we finally introduced our very own merch store. Behind the scenes, we significantly improved the Omni Accounts system (which we originally introduced to make OmniPlan 4 our first universal purchase app) in order to make it ready for the launch of OmniFocus 4.
All that plus shipping OmniFocus 4 last year was truly exciting! And we’re even more excited as we look toward the future—continuing our mission to make powerful productivity software that helps people accomplish more every day. The year ahead will not be a typical year!
Embracing the Bleeding Edge
In the early years of the Omni Group, one of our primary customers was Wizards of the Coast. We helped them join the Internet (I registered wizards.com and omnigroup.com at the same time) and built a NeXT app to generate and print the first playtesting decks for Magic: the Gathering. All of these were very forward-looking activities for Wizards as a relatively young gaming company, and were some great projects for us in our fledgling software company.
When we built the first multimedia web browser for the NeXT platform in 1994, we recommended to Wizards that they might want to create a website where people could browse their product catalog online. I’ll never forget their response: “Ken, we like being on the cutting edge of technology, not the bleeding edge!” Fair enough! Hardly anyone was on the web back then. And a few years later, when it became clear that a website was worth having, they did build one (and their company continued on to be hugely successful).
But I guess you could say that living on the bleeding edge became a pattern for us! We’ve always loved pushing technology forward, with apps ready on day one for the launches of:
- NeXTSTEP 3 (1992)
- OPENSTEP 4 (1996)
- Rhapsody Developer Release (1997)
- Mac OS X Server (1999)
- Mac OS X (2001)
- Mac transition to Intel processors (2006)
- iPhone App Store (2008)
- iPad (2010)
- Apple Watch (2015)
- Mac transition to Apple silicon (2020)
So here we are in 2024, thirty years after creating that OmniWeb browser (its 30th anniversary is this week), leaping forward once again! It triggers a bit of deja vu to again ship on day one for the launch of a completely new computing platform: in this case, OmniPlan for Apple Vision Pro.
Is there a huge market of people lining up to purchase Apple Vision Pro? I honestly couldn’t say! We’re investing our time to create the future we want, the future we see, the way we think things ought to be. If we were driven by following market research (or venture capitalists), we would never have built apps for NeXT, or Mac OS X, or that first iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch. It wasn’t clear whether there would be a market for any of those. Some had to evolve before they took off.
To take part in building the future takes a leap of faith, much like we did with “iPad or Bust!” back in 2010. And that’s what we’re doing again today, as we work to bring our entire product lineup to yet another completely new platform, visionOS: a platform that we think holds amazing promise for the long-term future of computing. (I had a great conversation with Todd Bishop of GeekWire about this, which you can read about or listen to.)
Bringing all our apps to visionOS isn’t a small project; “iPad or Bust!” took two and a half years. But we’re off to a good start with OmniPlan, and I’m pleased to share today that OmniFocus for Apple Vision Pro is now available for TestFlight.
Building on Strong Foundations
Building the future may take a leap of faith, but it also requires a strong foundation. Much like every other platform Apple has introduced over the past few decades, the new visionOS platform is built using Macs—making our Mac apps more important than ever.
Whenever we ship a new major version of an app—such as OmniFocus 4—we think of it as reaching the starting line of a car race, rather than its finish line. Getting to that starting line takes an enormous amount of preparation, but now the fun begins: it’s time to hit the gas pedal! We had 10,000 people in the OmniFocus 4 TestFlight, but that’s still a small portion of our overall customer base. With OmniFocus 4 now available to everyone, we’re learning new things every day. We’ve had quite a few great five-star reviews for the work we’ve done so far, and we’ve dedicated some of our team to work full-time on updates that continue to improve performance and fix bugs: we’ve already gone from version 4.0 to version 4.0.5 in just two months. We are also testing updates for OmniFocus for the Web.
With that strong foundation to build upon, we’re looking forward to continually adding features to OmniFocus! The primary focus of version 4.1 is to run natively on visionOS, but we’ll soon be adding other features such as new date filtering options in custom perspectives. We look forward to introducing other new features over the coming months—please be sure to let us know what features would be most useful to you!
We’ve talked about OmniPlan and OmniFocus, which are already universal apps. We will continue to work to make all of our apps universal! Though the OmniGraffle 8 TestFlight is currently only available on macOS, we’re working to bring its new code to iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS. And, eventually, as we build OmniOutliner’s new native app for Apple Vision Pro, it will not be a separate app: it will be a universal purchase which natively supports macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS.
Omni Automation continues to be an important foundation element within our apps, powering hundreds of free plug-ins (such as these). Omni Automation also made it possible for us to deliver the first third-party app with support for Voice Control—which is more important than ever on visionOS, where the most direct forms of input are your eyes, hands, and voice. We look forward to offering Voice Control support in more of our apps this year.
Expect the Unexpected
Though we invariably keep our own roadmap in mind, we also always bear in mind that we’ll need to adapt to our environment as it changes. WWDC is just four months away, and will undoubtedly introduce developers to new versions of macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and visionOS. (I expect we’ll see a fair number of changes for visionOS now that it’s in the hands of users!) We know we’ll need to spend some of our summer working to update our apps to be compatible with these platform updates—whatever they may be—so our apps are ready to ship alongside those updates in the fall.
Our world is constantly changing! Our roadmap is never a perfect prediction of the future, and is subject to change in response to our changing environment. But I hope this gives you some sense of our direction: where we’ve been, what we’re working on today, and where we’re headed next.
(At the Omni Group, we make powerful productivity apps which help you accomplish more every day. Feedback? I’d love to hear from you! You can find me on Mastodon at @kcase@mastodon.social, or send me email at kc@omnigroup.com.)
