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.)

Magic happens when visual thinking leads to a way to tell better stories. In this episode of The Omni Show, we talk with documentary filmmaker, George Washington University professor, and LinkedIn Learning instructor, Jason Osder, about his creative path, his history teaching OmniGraffle for UX and brainstorming, and the role visual tools play in shaping complex work.

Jason shares how OmniGraffle has supported everything from information architecture and wireframing to virtual index cards for documentary storytelling, giving him a flexible space to map ideas before they become finished projects. Listeners will hear a thoughtful conversation about filmmaking, teaching, process, and how diagramming can help clarify not only what we’re making, but how we think.

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!

In this episode of The Omni Show, we talk with Peter Boumgarden, PhD, Koch Professor of Practice for Family Enterprise at Washington University, about how OmniFocus helps him navigate work that rarely fits into one tidy category. On any given day, Peter might prepare a talk on private equity and healthcare, meet with university leaders, grade student work, coach T-ball, and catch a flight…all while trying to keep sight of the bigger picture.

Borrowing from several wise disciplines, Peter outlines his particular approach to using OmniFocus to organize, plan and narrow his attention to next actions. He also shares his novel approach automating the reflective component, borrowing from the social psychology of journaling, to close out the day effectively. Listeners will hear a thoughtful, practical conversation about building a system which balances focus with flexibility, efficiency with exploration, and productivity with a richer understanding of vocation and life.

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!

Cue the song “It’s a Small World” as background music for today’s terrific announcement. We’re very pleased to share with you that OmniOutliner 6.2 is available today (universal across all platforms), now with localizations in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese and Spanish. Or should we say, “now with localizations in Deutsch, Español, Français, 日本語, Nederlands, Italiano, Русский, 简体中文, Português do Brasil and 한국어”?

“Great things often begin with outlines” is true in any language. Outlines help clarify ideas, develop concepts, and stay organized amongst interruptions and chaos. This is all true anywhere in the world—but a powerful, helpful tool for outlining is a much better experience when it’s available in one’s own native language. We localize all of our apps, and it’s gratifying each time.

For us, localizing our software isn’t just a checkbox: it’s an expression of our values. We value people, respect our international neighbors, and encourage listening to each other with humility. They say to put your money where your mouth is, but what they don’t tell you is how great that really feels: to dedicate resources in a way that aligns with your values and mission.

Now that OmniOutliner 6 is a universal purchase across the Mac, iPad, iPhone and Apple Vision Pro, it’s especially fitting to have it localized across all of these languages. Our OmniOutliner 6 customers can now experience—in native tongue—the new design, visually refreshed with beautiful Liquid Glass design elements and a modernized look and feel; the new smart Dynamic Themes; the ability to open and work with concurrent multiple windows of the same document; Omni Automation with plug-ins to access Apple Intelligence language models; plus our groundbreaking Omni Links.

You can read more detail from our OmniOutliner 6 introduction blog post and the OmniOutliner product page. To get started with a free two-week trial that unlocks OmniOutliner 6 across all your devices, simply install OmniOutliner 6 on any device and sign into your Omni Account.

Here’s to keeping your thoughts in order, and the great things you’ll begin with an outline!

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.

First off, we’re very thrilled to be participating in the CommunityKit Indie Dev Fair this year. The event is designed for you to “discover an incredible lineup of indie apps from the people who built them.” We read that and thought, “Hey! We have an incredible lineup of indie apps and we’re the people who built them!” We’re in! This free event is happening on Wednesday, June 10 from 2–4pm PDT, at the Residence Inn by Marriott San Jose Cupertino. We’ll be the table with the Omni Group stickers… and a few other fun surprises! Come by and get a sneak peak of the upcoming OmniGraffle 8, or stop by to chat with us about any of our apps.

We’re also looking forward to the CommunityKit “Step Into Vision” event 10am Tuesday, June 9 at the Residence Inn by Marriott San Jose Cupertino. With three (soon to be four!) native visionOS apps available for Apple Vision Pro, we think we might have a thing or two to contribute to this community “show and tell” event!

Finally, we’re incredibly pleased to once again be sponsoring LIVE Near WWDC – a benefit concert, featuring “James Dempsey and the Breakpoints” (a collection of nerds, techies, and community luminaries from around the globe) performing songs written by James on programming themes. It is our honor to contribute as an event sponsor to help cover the costs, which helps more funds go directly to the beneficiary, Techtonica. It’s happening on Thursday, June 11, doors open at 7pm. Admission is free, with a cash bar — just register and donate!

You can also expect to find us at coffee and breakfast meetups throughout the week. Please say hello - we’re friendly, and have we mentioned that we have stickers?

Whether you’ll be attending in person or participating from afar, we hope you have a great WWDC!

What if your task manager could tell the story of your life? We talk with social scientist, and longtime OmniFocus user, Ryan Briggs about what happens when one trusted system grows with you for nearly two decades. From undergraduate chaos, to academic research, to family life, tenure, parenting, and everything in between.

Ryan shares how OmniFocus became an external memory: a place where tasks, reminders, birthdays, research obligations, family logistics, and even the rhythms of life all live together without adding mental weight. Along the way, he reflects on finding a system that truly fits your brain, the hidden value of consistency, the cost of constantly switching tools, and what his own 12-year task archive reveals about how work and life have changed over time.

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!

In this episode, we sit down with University of Virginia data science professor Yong-Yeol (YY) Ahn for a fascinating conversation that moves from network science and how ideas actually spread to the very practical realities of staying organized in a busy, idea-heavy life.

YY shares smart, grounded insights on avoiding “shiny object syndrome,” building a productivity system that evolves with you, using OmniFocus as a trusted capture tool, and even creating powerful workflows with TaskPaper templates and AI-assisted processing. You’ll walk away with both big-picture perspective and immediately useful takeaways you can apply to your own work the same day.

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!

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!