The Omni Group Newsletter

OmniGraffle 7.8 for Mac: Effortless Connections, Easy Layout

OmniGraffle 7.8 for Mac, released in early July, includes a bunch of improvements to line routing, auto layout, keyboard editing, and to the sidebar. These improvements allow you to make beautiful and effective diagrams more easily than ever.

The biggest change is to the orthogonal line routing algorithms — which have been thoroughly modernized to provide better routes, making the connections in your diagrams even easier to follow.

Auto layout is updated too: changes are now animated, and its calculations have been made faster. You can now enable auto layout selectively, so that content that shouldn’t move stays where it is.

Mouseless editing — editing via keyboard — has gotten better: we’ve fixed some bugs to maintain the selection when using the sidebar’s Outline tab to build a diagram.

The left sidebar can now be expanded to handle long titles and very deep hierarchies. And you can now quickly create diagram nodes by pasting text into the Outline tab — each line becomes a new node.

Read the release notes for the full scoop. If you haven’t tried OmniGraffle for Mac before, then go get started with our 14-day free trial.

In fact, even if you have tried it before, but didn’t buy, you can try it again. We’ve reset the trial clock — because this release is worth it.

And! OmniGraffle 3.6 for iOS is also out, and brings the relevant improvements to iPhone and iPad. Check out the release notes for more info.

OmniPlan 3.10 for Mac: Testing Soon

Big improvements to OmniPlan’s tools for syncing and sharing projects are coming soon, and will be available for public testing before release. Watch the blog for details — we’d really appreciate your feedback!

We are replacing the interface for setting up and managing publishing and subscription actions in OmniPlan Pro for Mac. The new interface and workflow will make this powerful feature easier to discover, set up, and use.

We’re also improving our Google Calendar integration by implementing support for their newer authentication API, as well as fixing bugs and making other improvements throughout the application.

Inside OmniFocus

We’re continuing to publish new articles on Inside OmniFocus, to help you get the most out of the app.

Our favorite articles are written by people outside Omni who use OmniFocus — and so we have Getting Out of the Inbox, where Daniel Steinberg talks about how he processes his Inbox. He makes great use of the Forecast Tag and a “Pending” project.

And check out the blog post on flexible inspectors — learn how to make OmniFocus work the way you want it to work.

Chef Terry Puts Down His Knives

Terry Stearns, our Executive Chef for 19 (!) years, has moved on to start the next chapter of his life. The title of our farewell-to-Terry blog post is Nineteen Years of Magic Every Day — because that’s what it was. We all miss him and wish him the very best.

In the middle of the afternoon on his very last day, Terry sat down to be interviewed for The Omni Show, and we’re so glad to have his voice on the record. And Terry, a musician as well as a chef, literally leaves us with a song.

Other recent episodes worth checking out are The Omni Show Live from right next door to WWDC and interviews with Aaron Cherof (Support Human) and Tami Snyder (Operations Assistant).

So Much Happening in OmniFocus Land

OmniFocus 3 for Mac is almost ready for testing. We’re excited, and we can’t wait to get your help making sure it’s an awesome new OmniFocus. If you’re willing, you can sign up to help test. (If you’d previously signed up to test the iOS version, there’s no need to sign up again. We’ve got you.) We plan to ship it in September.

Work on OmniFocus for the Web continues — and it’s getting closer and closer to testing too. If you’re curious, read the section at the end of the Omni Roadmap 2018 about it, or listen to the episode of The Omni Show with CEO Ken Case where he talks about the roadmap.

You can help test! Sign in to your Omni Sync account, and then scroll down to the “OmniFocus for the Web Test” section to join the testing group. We’ll notify you, when it’s ready, how to get started.

And, while all this is going on, we continue to release regular updates to OmniFocus 3 for iOS. All things just keep getting better.

T-shirts! Some with Cats!

To celebrate the launch of OmniFocus 3 for iOS, we designed some great new artwork for T-shirts, mugs, stickers, and more — and it’s all available on our new store on Society6.

From the classic OmniFocus checkmark, to three very chill cats, to one three-eyed purple cat who’s carrying his friend who’s a snake covered in roses — we’ve got art for your every mood.

Just don’t ask us what that one cat means. It’s cool, and that’s that.

Plus it’s all for a good cause: the money we make goes to App Camp for Girls.

OmniDogs!

We’ve been posting pictures of Omni doggos every Friday on our microblog! Here’s Rosie, who — it almost goes without saying, but we like to say it anyway — is the best dog. Rosie really likes belly rubs.

But we’ve got Really Big News — we’re switching to OmniCats! We’ll let the dogs have a well-earned rest, and we’ll go wake up the cats. :)