What an exciting WWDC25! We always look forward to what Apple will announce at their annual developer conference (sometimes with a little trepidation, considering the way changes in their platforms affect our plans and schedule). Then we like to take a moment. To quote one of the great philosophers of the ’80s, Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
Afterwards, we look forward to sharing updates with you—reviewing the first half of our year, then looking ahead at how our plans for the second half of the year might need to shift based on what we’ve learned from WWDC.
Since sharing January’s roadmap, the OmniFocus team has been hard at work on a pair of feature releases: OmniFocus 4.6, which shipped just ahead of WWDC, and the upcoming OmniFocus 4.7! OmniFocus 4.6 improved note and attachment functionality in OmniFocus, with new support for resizing image attachments, refinements to paste behavior, and more. OmniFocus 4.7 will introduce three powerful new features: a new “Planned” date type (for specifying the date an item is scheduled for work), the ability to create mutually exclusive tags (handy in a variety of workflows, like prioritization and energy level assignment), and improved repeat functionality (including new support for setting a repeat to end after a specific date or set number of repetitions). As these new features will require a database migration, the OmniFocus team has also spent extensive time polishing and testing the migration process, and we’re just about ready for folks to take OmniFocus 4.7 through its paces in its public test builds.
Meanwhile, the OmniGraffle 8 development train rolls on! We improved support for reference objects and skew in its public test builds, and reviewed our palette designs to ensure they work better across all the platforms v8 will soon support (i.e. iPhone, iPad, and our upcoming native support for Apple Vision Pro).
Beyond the exciting work of new feature and major release development, we’ve also done work behind the scenes this year: streamlining purchasing options for new customers, and laying the groundwork for improving sync performance for people on other continents.
Liquid Glass, Foundation Models, and iPad Windows
While our teams were busy with projects big and small in the first half of the year, our friends at Apple were busy working on their own projects! And, as always, this summer we’ll prioritize making sure our apps are tested and updated for compatibility ahead of the release of macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and visionOS 26 this fall. This year, we also have a whole new Liquid Glass interface to consider for all four of our products, across their four supported platforms (or five, if you count OmniFocus for Apple Watch!).
Of course, we always strive for more than a minimum baseline of “compatibility” as we update our apps every summer—we love bringing new features to our customers in these updates as well, and some new features are given to our apps “for free” from the OS each year. But as much as we might hope for gifts, we’re also hoping to see dividends returned on work our team has already done while building a robust, modern suite of apps. Gifts are nice, while dividends are earned!
Where might these dividends come from? Over the last few years, we’ve invested a lot of time into learning and implementing SwiftUI in our apps. We’ve also shared feedback with Apple about our experiences, thoughts, and advice. We like being on the cutting edge, but prior to OmniFocus adopting SwiftUI there weren’t many serious productivity apps trying to do major work with it! It’s gratifying to see SwiftUI make improvements each year which directly address some of our concerns and feedback and make it easier for us to build the kind of apps we build.
SwiftUI has come a long way over the past five years. From the start, SwiftUI made it easier for us to share code across platforms. With Apple’s preview of Liquid Glass, they’re making the broadest software design update ever—one which involves all of their platforms at the same time! Liquid Glass is still evolving—in just a few short weeks, we’ve already seen significant changes from the initial beta to beta 2—but we already appreciate having a more consistent design language across all Apple’s platforms. Our investment in SwiftUI is now paying the dividend of making it easier to adapt our apps to this new design language. Since widgets are also built with SwiftUI, we also see our investment extend into new contexts, with OmniFocus widget support coming to visionOS and CarPlay.
Speaking of extending our apps’ logic into new contexts, with the new OS 26 platform updates Spotlight can become much smarter about integrating with our App Intents. We’re excited to see this move forward! In addition to the great App Intents we already support (which power the all-new shortcuts introduced in OmniFocus 4.5), we’re modernizing our older SiriKit intents (for features like Omni Automation) to use App Intents so they will integrate better with these new systems.
We’re seeing other dividends this year as well! Our investment in Omni Automation continues to pay off: we’re adding support to our plug-ins for leveraging Apple Intelligence’s new foundation models on device in a way that protects your privacy and offers you control. With just a day of experimentation, we already have local sessions which can do things such as draft a project with the steps required to add solar power to your home. The Apple Intelligence story continues to evolve, and we’re keeping up.
With these dividends, we can continue our work full steam ahead on our exciting slate of upcoming releases, like bringing a Kanban view to OmniFocus later this year, the anticipated cross-platform launch of OmniGraffle 8, and a first public look at OmniOutliner 6. Of course, we also have plenty of homework to think about, as we consider how Liquid Glass affects all of our upcoming designs and where it might be appropriate to adopt in our existing shipping app interfaces. (Stay tuned!)
Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention that Apple has made—in my opinion—the most dramatic update to the iPad interface in its entire history, with support for overlapping (and dare I say Mac-like) windows. These changes are optional, so people who prefer to dedicate their piece of glass to a single app can still do so. Brilliant! Obviously, this is something we also need to consider, design, and implement as we develop all our iPad apps. (Stay tuned on that front as well!)
That’s a lot of work underway, and—Poof!—there goes 2025, on to 2026. But first, we have a fun, busy summer and fall ahead!
(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 in the Mastodon corner of the Fediverse at @kcase@mastodon.social, or send me email at kc@omnigroup.com, the same address I’ve had since 1992.)
