What an exciting WWDC26! We always look forward to Apple’s announcements, as well as getting together with the developer community. This year was our first experience attending CommunityKit, with two occasions to have a table and meet with community members. We enjoyed meeting with long-time OmniGraffle users at the CommunityKit Indie Fair, reminiscing about OmniGraffle’s 25-year history and looking ahead to the upcoming OmniGraffle 8 release.
I also really enjoyed meeting up with other visionOS developers at the Step Into Vision event during this year’s WWDC. The energy of the visionOS community reminds me of the NeXT era, with passionate developers and users working with a tiny platform because they believe it’s on the path towards the future they want to build—not because they’re trying to hitch themselves onto an existing juggernaut of commercial success.
It was also fun to join James Dempsey and the Breakpoints playing at Live Near WWDC.
And, of course, beyond meeting up with the community, for this year’s WWDC we thought that Apple might refine some of the major leaps forward from the last two years. And they did not disappoint!
Heading into WWDC is a moment to look back at what we’ve achieved so far from our January Roadmap. This year looked different in that we had just shipped OmniOutliner 6 at the start of the new year. We’ve since shipped two feature updates to OmniOutliner, introducing a powerful collection of new Shortcuts actions using App Intents in OmniOutliner 6.1, and localizing into ten more languages in OmniOutliner 6.2 including Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese and Spanish.
As planned, for the past several months we’ve predominantly focused our attention on OmniGraffle 8. However, that didn’t keep us from delivering maintenance updates to OmniFocus and OmniPlan, and continuing to test our new OmniFocus sync servers in Amsterdam and Singapore.
As discussed in the 2026 Roadmap, OmniGraffle 8 is designed to be a universal app. For current testers, we’ve expanded its test beyond macOS to include iOS and iPadOS. We’ve been working hard to craft OmniGraffle 8 as a universal app and add new diagramming features. OmniGraffle 8 is still the biggest release we have planned for this year, and we’re really looking forward to it!
With all of this work under our belt, we headed to Cupertino to see how Apple’s announcements might affect those plans.
Looking Ahead
Last year we started designing our approach to Kanban in OmniFocus. I originally started off thinking that Kanban might simply be another way of viewing existing perspective contents. But then I went back and re-read the book, “Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life,” which refreshed my sense of some of the flexibility we may want to offer.
I shared those thoughts with the team; and the more deeply we thought about the use cases for Kanban, the more we realized we needed new flexibility that our current perspectives don’t provide. I think we now have most of the initial design work done, so it should be ready for our engineers to work on soon after OmniGraffle 8 ships.
At WWDC, Apple shared how they’ve been making SwiftUI more robust. Apple has been using it themselves as the foundation for new AppKit and UIKit features, whereas previously SwiftUI was entirely built on top of AppKit and UIKit foundations. Fortunately, our investment in SwiftUI continues to pay dividends: both immediately with its cross-platform benefits, and in the long-term as Apple demonstrates their clear commitment to it. For example, they’re making SwiftUI view content much easier to drag and drop, making swipe gesture support easier to add, and so on. We can see it’s not just talk; they’re walking the walk.
Even smarter intelligence
Siri is the face of Apple Intelligence, but behind the scenes Apple Intelligence has a whole range of technologies in Golden Gate and OS 27: Siri App Intents, App Entities, On-screen Awareness, App Domains, Foundation Models, Private Cloud Compute, Core AI, Visual Intelligence, and Image Playgrounds.
Over the last two years, our team has continually to worked to adopt App Intents in our apps. So far, this has given us powerful new Shortcuts actions for OmniFocus and OmniOutliner, modernized Omni Automation support, and has improved our integration with Spotlight. This year, the investment will pay off even more as Siri begins to work with App Intents, including the ability to work with our apps using natural language, and for Siri to know what elements of our apps are on screen.
We’ve already implemented access to Apple’s Foundation Models by way of Omni Automation plug-ins, and with the new APIs introduced at WWDC26 we’ll be able to expand that support to support alternate models. We’re also prototyping new ways we might leverage Foundation Models directly in our apps to implement new natural language features.
Our particular approach to querying the on-board Apple Intelligence is well-aligned with Apple’s approach, valuing privacy and working locally. We’re glad to see Apple build a platform for AI, not just a narrow solution. You can expect our future efforts to continue to value privacy, work locally, and put the user in control.
We have been thinking deeply about how AI has been advancing. The technology itself can have some really great applications, when put to good use. But there are also real controversies and real concerns. We’re very careful about how we use AI ourselves. I look forward to talking about that in more depth, but that’s a whole different topic for another day.
AI technologies are moving fast, so we applaud Apple’s nimble approach. Apple doesn’t need to limit the system to one LLM, when they can instead make it easy for third parties to provide LLM options.
At WWDC, we also watched to learn whether Apple’s architecture would have a place for existing AI harnesses and orchestration tools, which talk to apps using the Model Context Protocol (MCP). We’ve been watching the MCP space all year, but we’ve been reluctant to implement something that might be redundant with work Apple was doing. This year, Apple did announce MCP integration for Xcode, but not for App Intents; Xcode’s integration is only for developers, not for end users.
Now that we know what Apple is (and is not) planning, we can continue thinking about how best to add first-class MCP support (perhaps by integrating directly with Omni Automation or with our App Intents).
Implementing MCP support will make it easy for customers who have started working with Claude and other LLM orchestrators to integrate their AI-based workflows with our apps. Some customers have already wired up MCP to all of our apps using our Omni Automation APIs, but we want to make this easier for all of our customers who have this need.
We want our apps to be available for our customers who are trying to work in those AI ecosystems, but we also want to be careful not to impose AI on those who have concerns or who are not interested. Wish us luck! And if you’re interested in helping us test this work, let us know.
OS 27 Compatibilty
While we are excited about the new features described above, our very first priority for this summer (as it is every summer) is to ensure compatibility of our apps by September, across all operating systems, on all platforms (Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Vision Pro, and Apple Watch).
Behind the scenes, this includes all of our universal apps (OmniPlan 4, OmniFocus 4, OmniOutliner 6, and the upcoming OmniGraffle 8), of course—plus OmniGraffle 7 for Mac and OmniGraffle 3 for iPhone and iPad. (Updating multiple different versions of OmniGraffle… have we mentioned we can’t wait for OmniGraffle 8 to also be universal?)
It’s amazing to think that the iPad’s support for multiple windows is only a year old. It already seems like it’s been there forever. Liquid Glass was an ambitious project, but has indeed unified app interfaces across Apple’s platforms. And the promise of a Siri that can actually understand natural language is finally being realized. After two years of Apple announcing dramatic changes at WWDC, we’re enjoying the calmer waters of the important refinements in this year’s updates.
Once again, 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.)
