OmniOutliner Shortcuts Actions in Action

Interested in taking new OmniOutliner Shortcuts actions for a test drive? Our team has built a handful of example shortcuts so you can jump right in. To try these out, simply update to OmniOmniOutliner 6.1 on your Mac, iPad, iPhone, or Apple Vision Pro, then install the example shortcuts via the provided link! (If you’re brand new to Shortcuts, you may also find it helpful to review Apple’s Shortcuts User Guides for Mac, iPhone and iPad, and Apple Vision Pro.) Most OmniOutliner shortcuts require OmniOutliner Pro.

Add a new entry to a personal journal in OmniOutliner with the Journal Entry example shortcut.

Translate Document Rows

This example shortcut provides Spanish, Japanese, and German translations for row text in an OmniOutliner document. To try this shortcut out, first create an OmniOutliner document with a set of English sentences or phrases to translate. When the shortcut is run, additional columns which contain translated text in Spanish, Japanese, and German will be created in your document.

Install Translate Document Rows example shortcut

Checkout Nearby Coffee Shops

This shortcut provides an example of populating an OmniOutliner document with content created by another application. When run, this shortcut searches Maps for coffee shops near your current location, then populates an outline with these results and adds columns for coffee shop address, distance from your current location, and your personal rating. (Note, in order to run this shortcut, you’ll first need to create a new outline document in OmniOutliner with your preferred template.)

Install Nearby Coffee Shops example shortcut

Unchecked Rows to OmniFocus Project

This shortcut provides an example of moving information out of OmniOutliner into another application (in the case, OmniFocus). When run on a flat outline, this shortcut copies the title and note field of any row with an unchecked status box to a new action in OmniFocus. This could be useful for sending a list of camping supplies you don’t already have to an OmniFocus shopping list, or for creating follow up actions for select items in a set of meeting notes.

Install Unchecked Rows to OmniFocus Project example shortcut

Endless Workflow Possibilities

This is just a small sampling of the functionality you can unlock with Shortcuts and OmniOutliner 6! OmniOutliner Shortcuts actions can also tap into Apple Intelligence via the Use Model action, which can create or analyze outline content via Apple’s secure on-device or cloud compute models. OmniOutliner shortcuts also can continue to leverage the full power of cross-platform Omni Automation via the Omni Automation Script and Omni Automation Plug-In actions.

We’re excited about the wide range of unique workflows that could be created with these Shortcuts actions, and we’d love to see the shortcuts you create! If you’d like to share your own shortcuts with our team and members of the Omni community, Omni’s Slack workspace and Discourse forums are great places to share and connect. We hope you enjoy this OmniOutliner update and can’t wait to find out what you do with it!

What if the most productive thing you could do right now is stop reorganizing your to-do list? Today, we sit down with Trevor Foley: a 20-year operations veteran whose career stretches from physically mounting movie ads for Sony Pictures in the late ’90s to producing custom ad experiences at Hulu in its earliest days.

Trevor walks us through how reading Getting Things Done led him to OmniFocus back in 2008 and completely changed the way he works (and rests). You’ll hear his “hub and spoke” philosophy for making OmniFocus your decision-making layer (not your to-do list). Plus, his surprisingly practical family calendar system that’s kept his household in sync for over 15 years without a single “who’s picking up the kids” text.

He also drops real talk on what he calls “productive procrastination” (that seductive trap of endlessly redesigning your system instead of actually doing the work). Whether you’re new to GTD or a seasoned OmniFocus user looking for a gut-check, this one’s packed with hard-won wisdom you can put to use today.

Achieve more of your goals when you download Omni software for Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch—and if you have any questions or feedback, email support@omnigroup.com. Our amazing Support Humans are standing by, ready to help.

Enjoy!

As a company that likes to live on the cutting edge, how does the Omni Group stay on the forefront of Apple platforms? In this episode of The Omni Show, CEO Ken Case shares an inside look at the 2026 roadmap (and it’s packed!).

From the evolution of OmniFocus and the expanding potential of Omni Links, to a thoughtful approach to Apple Intelligence with privacy in mind, Ken shares the philosophy driving every decision. You’ll hear how Liquid Glass is shaping the future of the apps, why OmniGraffle 8 is such a pivotal release, what universal purchases mean for customers, and even what’s ahead for OmniFocus with Kanban and new global data centers. If you care about powerful tools, careful design, and software that respects both your workflow and your privacy, this conversation offers an exciting behind-the-scenes view of where things are headed next.

Achieve more of your goals when you download Omni software for Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch—and if you have any questions or feedback, email support@omnigroup.com. Our amazing Support Humans are standing by, ready to help.

Enjoy!

Like last year’s roadmap, this roadmap won’t be a perfect oracle, since the future is never certain. There is a regular rhythm to our annual calendar: new technologies will be introduced to developers at WWDC at the beginning of our summer, and we’ll need to update all our apps to be ready to ship with the new operating systems in the fall. But we don’t know exactly what will be introduced each year, so we go into the year knowing that we’ll need to adjust our plans as we learn what Apple has in store for us.

Looking back, 2025 was a very “heads-down working” type of year. We introduced significant new technology to power two amazing new features introduced in OmniOutliner 6, which will also be coming to the rest of our apps. We are, of course, referring to Omni Links and the Omni Automation access to Apple’s Foundation Models framework (Apple Intelligence).

Omni Links

The first significant feature developed in 2025 was Omni Links. As mentioned in last year’s roadmap, we’ve been pondering how to approach this for a while. We took a look back at how we originally designed links to work (before syncing and sandboxing), and built universal Omni Links, which are even more powerful.

John Gruber succinctly explained why Omni Links are an ambitious solution to a complex problem:

The two fundamental models for apps are library-based (like Apple Notes) and document-based (like TextEdit). Document-based apps create and open files from the file system. Library-based apps create items in a database, and the location of the database in the file system is an implementation detail the user shouldn’t worry about.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both models, but one of the advantages to library-based apps is that they more easily allow the developer to create custom URL schemes to link to items in the app’s library. Omni Links is an ambitious solution to bring that to document-based apps. Omni Links let you copy URLs that link not just to an OmniOutliner document, but to any specific row within an OmniOutliner document. And you can paste those URLs into any app you want (like, say, Apple Notes or Things, or events in your calendar app).

With Omni Links, you can link to content across all your devices, and you can share those links with other people and other apps. Until now, this is something that has been missing from native document-based apps. If you share an Omni Link with a team member who doesn’t yet have OmniOutliner 6, they can download the app and use it in Free Viewer mode.

Omni Links are easy to create, easy to use, and easy to share. Omni Links also power up Omni Automation, giving scripts and plug-ins a way to reference and update content in linked documents.

Apple Intelligence

The second significant feature developed in 2025 was our carefully considered support for Apple Intelligence, which enabled optional new AI-powered workflows in OmniFocus and OmniOutliner.

“AI” (specifically, generative large language models) filled the news over this past year. It was a very hot topic: some people love it, some people find it very concerning. The concerns are real and valid; the helpfulness is also real. There’s a lot for the industry to untangle, and everything is changing quickly.

We’ve been thinking deeply about this. We recognize that we’re not in a position to resolve every concern nor do we want to make decisions for our customers. Everyone’s use cases are so different. As such, we think it’s crucial to put control in the hands of the user.

Omni Automation is also all about putting control in the hands of the user, so that’s our fulcrum for integrating with Apple Intelligence. This particular approach to querying the on-board Apple Intelligence shipped first in OmniFocus, and is now also shipping in OmniOutliner.

Our approach to Apple Intelligence, and AI generally, is offline. It’s private. It’s customizable. It’s under your control. It’s not reliant on anything out in the cloud. And it’s happening based on the power of the device that’s already at your fingertips.

Additionally, everything about our approach is completely opt-in. We think that’s important. Unlike some other solutions, we’re not trying to push anyone towards AI. But, many of our customers are using AI quite a bit and are excited by its capabilities. As Apple noted, using the Apple Foundation Models framework empowers users to unlock new app experiences in Omni apps.

Installing an Omni Automation plug-in is super easy, and intentional. The whole system is intentionally private. For example, if you ask about solar panels, that’s between you and your device and you won’t start getting all manner of solar panel advertising.

Again, we think it’s important to put control in the hands of the user.

Our Liquid Glass Journey

Last fall, we kicked off our Liquid Glass journey with OmniFocus 4.8, including the redesigned Liquid Glass Perspectives Bar. OmniFocus 4.8 also included support for a range of other OS 26 features: OmniFocus Shortcuts actions in Spotlight on macOS Tahoe 26, iOS 26 CarPlay widgets, resizing iPadOS 26 windows, watchOS 26 Control Center controls, and more!

OmniOutliner 6 continues our Liquid Glass journey, offering a significantly modernized design as a universal app for all of Apple’s computing platforms: desktop, mobile, and spatial.

Other Exciting Advances

OmniOutliner 6 now supports more features which were previously exclusive to one platform across all our platforms, such as the ability to create and edit advanced Saved Filters. On Mac, OmniOutliner also gained the ability to open and work with concurrent multiple windows of the same document (particularly useful when working with long outlines).

We shipped OmniFocus 4.6 with enhanced note and attachment functionality, new support for image attachment resizing, paste behavior refinements across platforms, and more. We also shipped OmniFocus 4.7 which introduced a “Planned” dates setting to let you plan when you want to work on tasks and projects.

And of course, we updated all of our apps to be compatible with macOS Tahoe 26, iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and visionOS 26 on the day and date that those operating systems shipped. Plus the upcoming OmniGraffle 8 development and testing continued on the Mac first, with iPad, iPhone, and Apple Vision Pro to follow.

Looking Ahead

Which brings us to looking ahead to 2026. It bears repeating that plans are just plans. They are not promises; plans can (and probably will) change. So, with that caveat firmly in place, here are our plans for 2026:

The biggest release we have planned for this year is OmniGraffle 8. This will be the culmination of many years of thoughtful work redesigning and rebuilding the app to be universal across all platforms. We’re using SwiftUI for a lot of this work, leveraging it to share more code and more logic: inspector palettes, settings, and so on.

Our work is focused on making OmniGraffle more approachable to new users, while not losing any of the powerful depth that our power users have come to expect—and, furthermore, to have a cross-platform experience that feels unified. We’re working to make it easier to navigate the app, so you can find its in-depth features when you need them, but not have them distract you otherwise.

Much like OmniOutliner 6, OmniGraffle 8 will also support: Liquid Glass design elements; Omni Links to link to (and share) content; Omni Automation access to the onboard Apple Intelligence LLMs, plus App Intents for when Siri starts to leverage them (hopefully this spring or so).

Though we’re designing OmniGraffle 8 to be a universal app, astute observers will note that our testing to date has been focused on the Mac platform. Mac remains Apple’s most capable platform, so we start with that focus to ensure we fully harness the Mac’s power. We then think about how to bring as much of that power as possible to Apple’s other platforms: iPad, iPhone, and Apple Vision Pro. Now that we’re on the home stretch, we will be starting TestFlights for those other platforms soon. OmniGraffle will be the final app in our suite of productivity tools to become universal, and we can’t wait!

Beyond OmniGraffle

Looking beyond OmniGraffle, we’re also very excited to bring Kanban to OmniFocus. We’ve spent significant cycles considering how Kanban works in the context of OmniFocus, and look forward to sharing that with you! We’re also working toward ultimately bringing Omni Links to OmniFocus, including Omni Links for attachments.

On the OmniOutliner front, of course we just shipped a major new release with OmniOutliner 6, and will continue its development with planned feature updates. We’re working on localizations for Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, and Spanish. We’re also working on enhanced App Intents, as well as Omni Links for attachments.

That may sound like plenty of development work for one year! All of those features that we’ve brought to the other apps will of course also be coming to OmniPlan: Omni Links, a Liquid Glass refresh, support for App Intents, and Omni Automation access to Apple’s Foundation Models framework (Apple Intelligence).

You can also expect that we’ll have compatible updates ready for new operating systems in the fall, as we do every year. It’s important to us, because we know people rely on Omni apps in their workflows (and new hardware always requires the latest operating system).

OmniFocus users outside of the United States may be interested to know that we’re looking to speed up syncing for customers on other continents, if possible. To this end, we’re testing new servers in Amsterdam and Singapore. OmniFocus data migrated to servers in other geographic locations would remain encrypted with keys only known to your devices, still included at no additional cost.

As mentioned above, we may need to shift our plans during the year, but we hope this gives you some sense of 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.)

Some productivity systems look great on paper but fall apart under real-world pressure. In this episode of the Omni Show, we talk with Jim Mitchell, Director of Salesforce Applications at Vizio. Jim shares how he moved from early, home-grown systems into OmniFocus, and how a simple, low-friction approach to task capture, planning, and reviews helps him manage teams, meetings, and personal responsibilities without overcomplicating things.

Listeners will come away with practical insights on keeping a single source of truth, using repeating tasks to reduce mental load, and resisting the urge to turn productivity into a hobby rather than a support system.

Achieve more of your goals when you download Omni software for Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch—and if you have any questions or feedback, email support@omnigroup.com. Our amazing Support Humans are standing by, ready to help.

Enjoy!

Some tools fade with time. Others simply become the backbone of how great work gets done. In this episode of the Omni Show, we welcome Ken Case, co-founder and CEO of the Omni Group, alongside automation expert Sal Soghoian. We take a first look at OmniOutliner 6, a release that redefines what outlining can be in the era of Apple Intelligence.

Listeners will discover a beautifully modernized, truly cross-platform Outliner (Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Vision Pro), powerful new Omni Links that jump straight to the exact content that matters across documents and devices, and remarkable demonstrations of private, offline automation that turns outlines into living systems. From writers and leaders to developers and lifelong planners, this episode shows how structured thinking creates clarity, momentum, and creative lift.

Achieve more of your goals when you download Omni software for Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch—and if you have any questions or feedback, email support@omnigroup.com. Our amazing Support Humans are standing by, ready to help.

Enjoy!

Happy New Year! Ready for a productive 2026? We have just the thing: we’re pleased to share that a major upgrade of OmniOutliner is ready for you today!

Great things often begin with outlines. Whether you’re a writer or a student, an attorney or a software developer, outlines created in OmniOutliner can help clarify and develop ideas and concepts. And the beginning of the year is a great time to take a step back from our ground-level to-do lists, to think about our plans more strategically at the 10,000-foot level. I’m doing this now myself, looking back at the past year and thinking about the year ahead, and find OmniOutliner indispensible for giving structure to those thoughts.

My love of outlines goes back to learning to write 10-minute essays as a freshman at the UW. We learned to spend the first 3-5 minutes writing our outlines (using the tools of that era, paper and pencil), then we would turn those outlines into prose. I quickly learned that those outlines were also great for putting structure to my history class notes, taking notes on one side of the page in my notebook, then returning later to rewrite those notes as an outline on the facing page.

As my writing tools evolved with technology, so did my outlining tools. I used the Outline mode in Emacs on BSD, then the outlining mode in Concurrence on the NeXT platform. I then found myself in need of a new outlining tool as we moved to Mac OS X, so we adapted a little tool I’d written for my wife (to catalog our book collection) and OmniOutliner was born.

I’ve now been using OmniOutliner for a quarter century, with quite a few design iterations over the years—first as a Mac-only app, then as we adapted the app to iPad (for “iPad or Bust!”) and later as we also brought it to iPhone. The new OmniOutliner 6 is super exciting to me, because it’s the first time we’ve seized the opportunity to take a step back and refresh the app’s design simultaneously across all of Apple’s computing platforms.

But we didn’t stop there. We also took a look back at how we originally designed links to work—before syncing and sandboxing—and, as part of this drive to make that power universal, we built Omni Links. (Omni Links won’t be exclusive to OmniOutliner, but this is where they’re debuting.)

And we didn’t even stop there! We can now leverage Apple Intelligence in OmniOutliner 6, using opt-in-only mechanisms that are offline, private, and customizable. As first introduced in OmniFocus 4.8, OmniOutliner can now query Apple’s on-device Foundation Models directly from Omni Automation scripts and plug-ins. Taking things a step further, OmniOutliner has new support for plug-ins to provide AI Tools that Apple Intelligence can query as well.

Enough with the introductions; let’s dive into the details!

Modernized, Beautiful Outlining

OmniOutliner 6 is designed as a universal app for all of Apple’s computing platforms: desktop, mobile, and spatial. In this modern era, we think it’s important to build an app that works consistently across all your devices, yet is optimized for each device.

Visually refreshed with beautiful Liquid Glass design elements and a modernized look and feel, OmniOutliner 6 feels right at home on the latest operating systems. Liquid Glass is not without its challenges, but it also has some clear benefits: for the first time ever, it simultaneously updates the design of Apple’s computing platforms in a consistent way. Paired with SwiftUI, Apple’s latest round of operating system updates provides us with a great foundation for building universal cross-platform interfaces.

Redesigning and rebuilding all of our toolbars, sidebars, and inspectors for Liquid Glass gave us a great opportunity to cross-pollinate features, making some familiar platform-exclusive features available across all platforms for the first time. And it was also easier than ever to build new features that work in consistent ways across those platforms.

For all platforms OmniOutliner 6 introduces smart Dynamic Themes, which automatically adapt to Light and Dark Mode, and a brand new cross-platform template picker.

On the Mac, OmniOutliner 6 additionally introduces the ability to open and work with concurrent multiple windows of the same document—something I find particularly useful when working with long outlines.

On the iPad and iPhone, OmniOutliner 6 adds support for creating and editing advanced Saved Filters, and a handy, new Style Attributes Inspector, plus additional style customization support for grid lines, row indentation and column-spanning Notes.

OmniOutliner 6 is now a fully spatial app on the Apple Vision Pro, joining OmniFocus and OmniPlan as our third native app. The unique, spatial computing environment provided by the Apple Vision Pro allows users to place outlines in specific locations around the office, room or house.

Omni Links

The features noted above already make for a great upgrade. But as I mentioned last year, one of the interesting problems we’ve been pondering is how best to link to documents in native apps. We’ve spent some time refining our solution to that problem, Omni Links, which are now shipping first in OmniOutliner 6. With Omni Links, we can link to content across all our devices, and we can share those links with other people and other apps.

Omni Links support everything we said document links needed to have. Omni Links work across all of Apple’s computing platforms and can be shared with a team. They leverage existing solutions for syncing and sharing documents, such as iCloud Drive or shared Git repositories. They are easy to create, easy to use, and easy to share.

Omni Links also power up Omni Automation, giving scripts and plug-ins a way to reference and update content in linked documents—documents that can be shared across all your team’s devices.

When you want to share your outlines with others, of course there are lots of built-in export options for PDF, HTML, RTF, plain text, spreadsheets, and so on. But, as with all of our apps, the unlicensed app has a Free Viewer mode for its own documents. With Omni Links, this makes collaboration easier than ever: you can select a row, copy an Omni Link, and share it with your team—and anyone with a Mac, iPad, iPhone, or Apple Vision Pro can open the link in the free viewer to see what you shared—no additional purchase required.

Apple Intelligence

There have been a lot of different iterations on “AI” over the decades, and whether you work in tech or elsewhere you’ve probably been exposed to the latest crop of generative AI models. One of the best things about Apple’s approach to generative AI, Apple Intelligence, is that it does most processing on your own device, rather than on someone else’s computer. Keeping your data on your own device is obviously important for privacy. It’s also important for reliability. You don’t have to worry about someone else’s computer being overloaded, unreachable, or deprecated: you know that you can do all your processing on the device that’s already at your fingertips.

With OmniOutliner, these powerful Apple Intelligence language models are fully under your control. Like all language models, they’re not perfect oracles by any means—and they’re not fundamental to using OmniOutliner. But sample plug-ins leveraging Apple Intelligence are ready for immediate one-click installation, and plug-in authors can integrate these language models with OmniOutliner in all sorts of creative ways.

For those who choose to use them, these plug-ins can be nice time savers: automatically summarizing an article into an outline, or generating content such as a meeting agenda or a fictional story based on a simple prompt. (Just be sure to review their work!) We tried this ourselves to generate some of the sample content in our screenshots, which illustrate a broad array of OmniOutliner use cases.

Making the Omni Suite Universal

With OmniOutliner 6, we now have three apps available as a universal cross-platform purchase. When you purchase an OmniOutliner 6 license, you can use the app across all of Apple’s computing platforms: Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Apple Vision Pro.

With all these new features, and the support for all these platforms with a single purchase, how much should you expect to pay? This might be too generous, but we’ve decided to launch the universal OmniOutliner 6 Pro app at $99.99—exactly the same price as OmniOutliner 5 Pro for Mac. We think this is a terrific value! For those of you who already have a license to any previous version of OmniOutliner (including the copies that were bundled with every MacBook twenty years ago), you can register those licenses to your Omni Account to receive a 50% upgrade discount on your purchase. (Upgrades are half price, as usual!)

With its beautiful Liquid Glass design, groundbreaking Omni Links, and on-device integration with Apple Intelligence, OmniOutliner 6 is the best ever. To get started with a free two-week trial that unlocks OmniOutliner 6 across all your devices, simply install OmniOutliner 6 from the App Store and sign into your Omni Account.

Here’s to a happy, healthy, and very productive 2026. I hope you enjoy OmniOutliner 6!

If you have any 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.

What happens when a high-stakes executive life collides with calm, intentional productivity? In this episode of The Omni Show, we sit down with Ivan Weiss, President and COO of elite | studio e, to explore how clarity, routines, and thoughtful systems create space for better decisions: both at work and at home.

Ivan shares the unexpected moment that pulled him into the Apple ecosystem, how OmniFocus became the operational center of his life, and why separating “working in the business” from “working on the business” changed everything. From morning and shutdown rituals to avoiding the trap of over-optimization, this conversation offers rare insight into how a seasoned leader stays composed amid constant demands, and why calm may be the most powerful productivity tool of all.

Achieve more of your goals when you download Omni software for Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch—and if you have any questions or feedback, email support@omnigroup.com. Our amazing Support Humans are standing by, ready to help.

Enjoy!

What if your to-do list wasn’t about squeezing more tasks into your day, but about feeling more alive? In this episode of The Omni Show, we sit down with Khe Hy: founder of Latour AI Consultancy, former Wall Street managing director, and longtime OmniFocus power user. We explore how productivity can shift from chasing checkboxes to designing a richer, more examined life.

You’ll hear how Khe uses OmniFocus’s unique Review feature as the backbone of a simple, sustainable system that keeps bills paid, relationships nurtured, and projects moving without drowning in due dates. Along the way, he shares how he treats OmniFocus like a personal CRM for birthdays, networking, and family health, and explains why he now sees productivity as an “accelerant of aliveness” rather than an end in itself.

Achieve more of your goals when you download Omni software for Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch—and if you have any questions or feedback, email support@omnigroup.com. Our amazing Support Humans are standing by, ready to help.

Enjoy!

When’s the last time you heard someone turn the art of focus into a philosophy for life? In this episode of The Omni Show, we sit down with Marko Anastasov. As cofounder of Semaphore and Operately, Marko provides a deeply practical and honest look at how he uses OmniFocus to balance leadership, creativity, and focus in a fast-moving world.

Marko shares the evolution of his productivity system, from startup chaos to clarity, revealing why simplicity often beats complexity. We also learn how the best systems support our focus. Listeners will walk away inspired to simplify their workflows, rethink how they plan their days, and rediscover the joy of doing meaningful work without the noise.

Achieve more of your goals when you download Omni software for Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch—and if you have any questions or feedback, email support@omnigroup.com. Our amazing Support Humans are standing by, ready to help.

Enjoy!