OmniOutliner for Mac

May 3, 2006

General

  • More detailed information about the application version is now available in the About panel and is sent with any crash reports.
  • Various types of errors now log to the console more details about where the error occurred.
  • Fixed a couple of memory leaks.
  • Various performance fixes.
  • Minor updates to built-in Help.
  • More scripting support for Kinkless GTD (details below in the AppleScript section).

Stability

  • (Pro only) Fixed crashes when upgrading Kinkless GTD documents to 0.83, also, likely fixed rare crashes when running the KGTD synchronize script.
  • Dragging a brand new (never saved) Address Book entry into OmniOutliner will no longer crash. Instead, the drag will be rejected until the entry is saved in Address Book.
  • Avoid crash in the system frameworks under 10.3.9 when using the up/down arrow keys to move into a newly created empty row.
  • Fixed a crash when dragging a label or URL from an attachment editor and dropping it as a new row.
  • Fixed error when hitting delete in an empty child row with a Hidden summary on the last column.
  • Fixed a few edge cases where attached files with Unicode names wouldn't get loaded correctly.
  • Worked around a Cocoa scripting bug where 'last character of SomeText' could crash.
  • Avoid an error in the control-cmd-d popup dictionary when used over an attachment in some cases.

Attachments

  • (Pro only) Fixed audio capture support on Intel Macs.
  • Handle PDF files exported from older versions of OmniGraffle as PDF instead of falling back to QuickTime.
  • Default label for attached files no longer has 'localhost' in it.
  • Closing a document that has open LinkBack attachments will now result in an alert warning of possible loss of changes if the attachment isn't saved in the editing application.

Software Update

  • We now report a few extra pieces of information back to Omni (Hardware name, CPU name and Video adaptor name). You can see what we report by clicking the "Learn more..." button on the Update preferences pane.
  • Fixed an Intel specific issue with gathering the connection speed set in the QuickTime preferences.

AppleScript

  • (Pro only) When creating a new named style or enumeration, you can specify an initial 'id' property.
    make new named style with properties {id:"my identifier"}
  • (Pro only) Added a new 'organize' command. This takes a list of rows, a list of columns and a destination and then builds a tree of rows based on the values in the specified columns. More details available in the script definition in Script Editor. This is vastly faster than trying to write the same operation in AppleScript.
  • (Pro only) Added scripting support for conduit settings via the new 'conduit setting domain' class. Each document and row has a set of conduit settings, which are identified by a reverse DNS identifier. This allows scripts to store extra information with rows and documents.
    For example:
    set MyDomain to conduit setting domain id "com.mycompany.myproduct" of MyDoc
  • The 'level' property now gets updated correctly on children of rows that were duplicated via 'duplicate' (or via copy/paste in the UI).
  • Fixed description of 'conduit setting domain' in the scripting terminology.
  • Added an 'automatic level styles' property on the 'document' class.
  • Rewrote our 'move' command support to have better type checking support and to fix several bugs with the existing type checking support.
    It should no longer be possible to do something crazy like "move every row to end of columns". Previously we'd catch some cases of this, but now we should get them all. Also, moving multiple objects at the same time should work in all cases now.
  • Likewise, when creating a new document, the identifier for the default topic and note columns can be specified, though this is less pretty.
    make new document with properties {|noteColumnId|:"note id", |topicColumnId|:"topic id"}
  • Human-readable error messages should be reported in more cases.
  • AppleScripts that are run from the toolbar will now create a single undo action. AppleScripts run from Script Editor or the system script menu won't have this convenience, however, since we can't know when the script is done running.
  • Added support for disabling undo operations. Using this should be done with a great deal of care as it can cause the user to lose edits, but this can provide a large performance boost for AppleScripts that cause lots of edits to the document (like Kinkless GTD) or that create documents from scratch.
  • Setting a document's alternate row color, background color or grid colors to 'missing value' now turns off that color.
  • Scripts can now edit styles on the document title.

Inspectors

  • Merged concepts and code from OmniGraffle 4's inspectors into our common inspector code base:
    • Inspector title bars now display the names of the selected inspectors or the inspector that the mouse is hovering over.
    • Inspectors can have zero tabs visible, in which case only the button ribbon is visible.
    • Buttons for inspector tabs should be dimmed if that tab doesn't apply to the current selection.
  • The Document inspector is now tabbed.
    • 10.4 only - Added a new Spotlight inspector that allows you to set some common metadata properties on your document. The Spotlight importer in this version of OmniOutliner understands the changes to the file format this caused. Make sure that you uninstall all earlier copies of OmniOutliner and OmniOutliner Professional (both!) to avoid having Spotlight pick the wrong importer plugin.
  • Labels on the column type inspector get grayed out when there is no selected column.
  • Worked around Cocoa bug that caused adjoining inspectors to slightly detach from each other when moving the inspector group between screens.

Printing

  • In Standard, the upper-left corner of the printout will now have the outline title (as set in the text view from View > Show Outline Title) instead of just the file name.
  • Fixed empty printouts that some users were seeing, mostly under 10.3.9.
  • Fixed incorrect text positioning in some cases with ligatures or other special font features.
  • Fixed a faint gray line running down the right edge of printouts at some scales and paper sizes.

Interface

  • (Pro only) Documents can now have custom toolbars. This can be toggled via the View menu or the Advanced tab of the document inspector. Documents that have their own toolbar store that toolbar in their file, including the items, size, text/icon mode and visibility of the toolbar.
  • (Pro only) Fixed a layout issue in the Audio Capture preference pane that caused Cocoa to come up with a crazy ordering for tabbing between controls.
  • (Pro only) Named styles no longer require unique names. This is nice when swapping the names of two named styles. This does have an implication for AppleScript references by name, though. We'll now return the first named style with the given name when you do something like:
    named style "My Name"
  • Paths to AppleScript toolbar items are now archived relative to the user's home folder (if the script is in the user's home folder). This means that packages like Kinkless GTD can distribute templates with custom toolbars that include references to the expected install location of related AppleScripts.
  • Fixed a regression that prevented toolbar items from being created for scripts in /Library or /Network/Library.
  • Values in enumeration columns no longer require unique names.
  • Fixed a case where dragging a row to the trash would result in an error panel.
  • Clarified text on the 'backup exists' dialog.
  • Escape will now select the row if you have a popup or checkbox cell selected.
  • The gear action buttons in the app and preferences now support keyboard access.
  • Command-clicking the drawer toolbar item of a background window no longer toggles the drawer of a foreground window.
  • The drawer icon orientation is now accurate for each window.
  • Tabbed inspector titles are now correct immediately after launching. Previously this wasn't the case if the inspector didn't have the default tab selected last time you quit the app.
  • When opening a document that has a column with both a summary and a sort order defined, the document will not become dirty on open.
  • Clicking a popup cell (or activating it by hitting space with the cell selected) will now correctly position the popup over the row.
  • The menu that comes up for editing popup values will now use the font of the popup column.
  • Added more search terms in online help.
  • Enabled spell checking in the default document template. If you have customized your template already, you won't see this change. You can set this in your template or click 'Reset' on the General preferences pane to revert your template to the built-in version.

Import/Export

  • MORE and Acta imports now work on Intel Macs.
  • Updated the XML DTD to be accurate about the current state of the file format.
  • The expand-all option on HTML exports will now handle cases where handles are hidden.
  • Exporting to OPML no longer drops single quotes.
  • Fixed another case where a control character could get written to XML output (preventing exporting to HTML, for example).
  • Fixed exporting via a Keynote 1 theme of various special XML characters.
  • Removed Keynote export preference pane. The release of Keynote 3 broke our exporting (again), so now we export via a built-in Keynote 1 theme always. This should make exporting more stable, as well as address some issues with changing certain attributes within Keynote. Once you open the exported file in Keynote, you can select the theme.
  • Exporting to RTF no longer loses links and attachments in the notes.

OmniOutliner for Mac 3.5

December 1, 2005

Highlights & New Features

  • OmniOutliner now requires Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later. Removal of 10.2 support allowed us to simplify a good chunk of code and the vast majority of users are not using 10.2 any more. See our software update statistics for more information.
  • Added LinkBack client support. This allows you to embed editable content from other applications into your OmniOutliner document. More details below.
  • Updated Tier-1 Localizations are now present (French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Japanese). If you see anything inside OmniOutliner that is not localized for one of these languages, it is a bug and we'd love to hear about it as soon as possible.

AppleScript

  • Fixed a performance issue with scripts that look up text values on rows for the purpose of merely reading them (notes, topics or other text columns). For example:

    first row of section 5 of front document whose note contains "Bob"

    is now much faster. This eliminates progressive slowdown in the Kinkless Getting Things Done scripts.
  • Duplicating hierarchies of rows will no longer erroneously apply automatic level styles to those rows when the document has this setting disabled.
  • Fixed a workaround that we had in place for a Cocoa scripting bug dealing with nested 'whose' specifiers that matched zero objects. Our over-zealous fix was causing a failure in the KGTD package's scripts.
  • Exporting documents via a specific XSL plugin is now easier/possible. In particular, this means you can control which of the many HTML variants are used when saving to a 'html' extension.
    save TheDocument to "path" as (id of ThePlugin as string)
  • Enumerations are now accessible with the 'id' reference form.

Attachments

  • Added LinkBack client support. This allows you to embed editable content from other applications into your OmniOutliner document.

Import/Export

  • We have switched from using Apache's Xalan XSL library to using libxslt. Libxslt is provided with Mac OS X as of 10.3.9, meaning our download size is now smaller and Apple gets to perform any necessary security updates on the XSL library instead of us. If you have custom XSL plugins, please try them out and let us know if any new problems appear (should be few, if any).
  • Updated the plugin loading code to require that the plugins have unique bundle identifiers and switch to using the bundle identifier as part of the AppleScript identifier for the plugin-defined file type.
  • We now refuse to load XSL plugins that have executable code. This was never used for nefarious purposes, but it seems like a good idea.
  • Fixed another case of plain text file attachments getting grabbed by QuickTime.
  • Enumerations now have unique identifiers that are stored in the file.
  • RTF export will no longer reserve space for handles if all the handle types are empty in the RTF Export preferences. Likewise, space will no longer be reserved for the checkboxes if all the checkbox options are empty.
  • Fixed issue where inadvertently added control characters could break exporting via our XSL plugins. OmniOutliner will now discard these characters.
  • Fixed issue with breaking the dynamic HTML export.
  • Some fixes to HTML export for row numbering.

Interface

  • Adding a new row will no longer cause the mouse pointer to appear briefly.
  • Keyboard navigation in preference panes is more consistent.
  • Split out older release notes into a different file.
  • Added a Welcome document to help new users find out more information about OmniOutliner. This will appear automatically once and from then on you can access it from Help > Welcome.
  • The Style Attribute inspector normally merges a group name and attribute name when the group only contains a single item. But, this could result in attribute names being clipped. Now, we only merge the two items if doing so would produce no clipping.
  • Fixed 'enter' key handling on PowerBooks so that it again toggles between editing the note and row text.

Spotlight

  • If an error occurs while indexing an OmniOutliner 3 document, a message will not be logged to the console. We don't know of any such errors making it out into the Real World™, but this seems like a good idea. Let us know if you see any such messages.

Stability

  • Fixed a crash when deleting and undoing a row that matches an existing batch find.
  • After a successful save, we now cancel any pending autosave. Also, after a 'save to' operation, we no longer cancel any pending autosave on the source document.
  • Fixed a problem with mouse tracking in the style attributes inspector that could capture your mouse.

OmniOutliner for Mac 3.0.4

November 2, 2005

Highlights & New Features

  • Added the beginnings of Accessibility support. In particular, with Tiger, you can now use the dictionary popup over text columns (control-command-d while pointing at a word).
  • Unified toolbar is now used with 10.4 and later.
  • When opening a document as the result of a Spotlight query, the batch find field is populated with the Spotlight query.
  • With Tiger, Automator workflows placed in the application's scripts folder (~/Library/Scripts/Applications/OmniOutliner Pro, for example) can now be added to your document toolbar (just like AppleScripts in that folder can). At present, the assumption is that the workflow doesn't need to be based on any inputs. If the active document is desired as an input, this can easily be obtained via the OmniOutliner automator actions.
  • The licensing code now allows multiple users on the same machine to use the same license at the same time.

Interface

  • Added tooltips for some inspector items that were missing them.
  • The notes pane no longer reveals itself when resizing the window after having manually dragged the notes pane all the way closed.
  • Added the beginnings of Accessibility support. In particular, with Tiger, you can now use the dictionary popup over text columns (control-command-d while pointing at a word).
  • When opening a document as the result of a Spotlight query, the batch find field is populated with the Spotlight query.
  • Unified toolbar is now used with 10.4 and later.
  • Fixed jumpy text alignment when navigating between text and non-text columns with different alignments.
  • Using the column inspector is much more pleasant now in the case that you are editing a cell in that column. In particular, if you had an enumeration cell selected in the document and added a new enumeration entry in the inspector, the selection in the document could end up changing to the row, and the column inspector would become disabled.
  • Hitting return to create a new item followed by undo will correctly restore the cursor position again.
  • The Ungroup command will now be available if the selection includes rows with children. Previously, at least one such row had to be expanded or the option would be disabled.
  • Added tooltips for items on inspectors that were missing them.
  • Fixed extra menu separator in context menu for attachments that haven't yet been saved.
  • Dragging a row by clicking in the text area and dragging up/down will now work more reliably (previously, in some cases it would start selecting the text).
  • Switching fonts should no longer cause non-Roman characters to disappear temporarily.
  • Dragging a named style to a text selection in the main outline view will again apply the named style to the text (working around Apple bug).
  • When reactivating the application after dropping a file attachment in to the application, the inspectors will be properly updated.
  • Fixed scrolling when selecting a batch find result with notes displayed in the pane.
  • Window cascading is now more robust in its search for the 'best' available space in which to tile windows. Previously, the location of the inspectors could confuse it and a large window size in your template file could confuse it.
  • Fixed vertical alignment of URL attachments when tags are hidden.
  • Added clarifying text about how autosaves work on the General preferences pane.
  • Improved error message presented to the user when trying to drag one named style onto another would result in circular inheritance.

AppleScript & Automator

  • With Tiger, Automator workflows placed in the application's scripts folder (~/Library/Scripts/Applications/OmniOutliner Pro, for example) can now be added to your document toolbar (just like AppleScripts in that folder can). At present, the assumption is that the workflow doesn't need to be based on any inputs. If the active document is desired as an input, this can easily be obtained via the OmniOutliner automator actions.
  • Added a 'has subtopics' property to the document class to fix a case where document and row weren't accessible the same way.
  • The terminology used in the 'Find related rows' Automator action is less confusing.

Attachments

  • Closing a file while editing a title or URL of an attachment cell should save the changes being made in the attachment
  • Editing attachment labels with folded editing enabled should no longer result in detached label editors.
  • Attaching files with a beginning character of '~' will no longer result in a file that can't be opened (working around an Apple bug).
  • Attached files with various Unicode characters in their names will no longer get lost when reopening the attached file (relatively rare, based on how the attachment name was produced). Workaround for an Apple bug.
  • File URLs that contain '@' get parsed correctly now.
  • Dragging an attachment from a row that isn't being edited into one that is being edited was copying the attachment instead of moving it.

Import/Export

  • Keynote exporting now recognizes themes in subfolders of the various theme locations.
  • We now search ~/Library/Application Support/iWork/Keynote/Themes for themes.
  • The popup on the theme chooser on the Keynote export preferences pane has been reorganized to be more clear about what is being selected (Keynote 1 vs. 2, built-in vs. custom).
  • When exporting to Dynamic HTML, the row handles should respect the 'Under mouse' visibility option in the Row inspector's Advanced pane.
  • HTML export of justified text now works.
  • HTML export now has quotes around font names.

Licensing

  • The license panel will now try to correct for a few more common differences between what owner name the license was generated for and what is entered in the panel.
  • The licensing code now allows multiple users on the same machine to use the same license at the same time.

Localization/Internationalization

  • Updated Japanese localization.
  • Updated German localization.
  • Updated French localization.
  • Sorting is now localized. That is, if you set your locale to Sweden, 'å' will sort after 'z' instead of next to 'a', but if you set your locale to US, 'a' and 'å' will sort near each other.
  • Updated inspector shortcut keys for French to make more sense for the default French keyboard layout.
  • Updated the default 'Edit Note' keyboard shortcut to make more sense on the default French keyboard layout.
  • Fixed corrupt French localized nib for audio capture settings that was preventing editing of audio capture settings.

Performance

  • Opening/closing documents with lots of named style usage is much faster now.

Printing

  • Somehow a few files were getting all their columns set to not print. We now detect this and print the topic column.
  • With 10.2, we now avoid a buggy PDF printing path that was causing clipping problems on multiple-page printouts (part of page 1 could appear at the top of page 2). Mac OS X doesn't have this problem with 10.3 or later.
  • Printing to PDF will now set the name of the printed file correctly instead of always resulting in 'Untitled.pdf'
  • Printing used to show the label if a URL attachment was collapsed and the URL string itself when the attachment was expanded, even if attachment tags were hidden. Now, we always print the label (which can obviously be set to the URL string if that is desired).

Stability

  • Navigating between columns of different types should no longer crash. This was only happening in very rare cases. Thanks to the users that helped us track this down!
  • Fixed a workaround we applied in 3.0.3 for a input manager issue that was causing alert panels in some cases.
  • Converting a text column to numeric now handles more cases. In particular, if you had a negative number expressed as "(100)" or a currency value, the text will be interpreted correctly.
  • In 10.4, pure-gray colors wouldn't get archived correctly due to a change in how Cocoa represents those colors.
  • We should no longer log 'invalid context' errors to the console (was happening sometimes when opening existing outlines with folded editing enabled or the sections drawer exposed).
  • Opening files with corrupted autosaves will now let you know and allow you to proceed opening the previously saved version of the file.
  • Activating an attachment in a header or footer in the Page Setup panel of an unsaved document will no longer result in insanity.
  • Dragging a named style onto another named style will no longer crash if this causes circular inheritance. This used to work, but got broken since 3.0.
  • Editing a URL attachment's URL will no longer crash if you insert an invalid URL.
  • The ruler will no longer crash if you click on an existing tab immediately after exposing it in a brand new file.

Styles

  • "Copy Style" will now preserve the transparency of copied colors, working around an Apple bug.
  • Can now turn off the text border checkbox and some shadow settings when a range of text is selected.

OmniOutliner for Mac

June 29, 2005

Attachments

  • OmniOutliner should no longer pause waiting to connect to disconnected AFP servers when you load documents that have links to files on those servers. Instead, the resolution of the link is delayed until the first time you try to active the attachment.
  • 'ESPD' attachments generated by Equation Service now show up as images instead of movies.

Audio Capture

  • OmniOutliner will no longer change the audio capture device's input sampling rate. This was intended to be a minor optimization (for example if you are only going to store 22kHz audio then we would try only capture at that rate instead of 44kHz). This is possibly the cause of a few oddities like QuickTime Player's audio breaking for people with particular hardware (until running Garage Band, which would restore the input sampling rate).

Automator Actions

  • This release adds a number of Automator actions for use with OmniOutliner. Please try them out and let us know what other actions you'd find useful in your day-to-day work. We have lots of other ideas for actions, but we welcome your input!

Clippings

  • Added a workaround for a problem introduced by Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" where the save panel for creating new clipping files wouldn't go away when you clicked "Save".
  • No longer creates clipping files when you hit "Cancel".
  • Adding a OmniOutliner 3 file to your clippings file (as a file attachment) will no longer produce a nested entry in your clippings services menu.
  • When scanning the clippings directory for clipping files, we no longer filter out wrapped OmniOutliner 3 files. As of recently all newly created OmniOutliner 3 files are wrapped, so this led to most clipping files not being present in the UI.
  • Fixed duplicate registration of our clippings distributed object that is used to communicate between the application and clipping service. This would lead to spurious messages on the console.

Export

  • New OmniOutliner 3 files will default to writing as file wrappers instead of being promoted to a file wrapper when the first attachment is added. In particular, this helps to avoid issue with iDisk syncing breaking when an OmniOutliner 3 file is upgraded from a flat file to a wrapper due to the first attachment being added.
  • Handles that were set to 'on hover' now appear in HTML export.
  • HTML exporter now sets the document title.
  • Collapsed linked images and movies now get links in exported HTML.
  • Carriage returns in row text no longer get lost when exporting to MS Word.
  • Keynote themes picked from custom locations now work.
  • Fixed export of 'type' attribute in XSL plugins that specify they want the extra attachment attributes.
  • Saving a document with a '&' in its title as OPML will no longer produce invalid XML.

Importing

  • Improved performance of Acta import
  • Fixed upgrading of OmniOutliner 2 documents that were using 10.3 underline attributes.

Interface

  • Pasting text when you have a batch find result selected will no longer scroll your view back to the matching row.
  • Batch find results are now updated again when rows are added and removed (including via undo/redo).
  • Fixed alignment problem in Text Export preferences
  • Minor localization updates
  • Removed OmniOutliner's custom script menu when running on 10.4 since 10.4 has global support for this that is better than ours was anyway. Users with scripts can simply move their scripts from your old ~/Library/Application Support/OmniOutliner 3/Scripts to the scripts folder created by the system scripts menu.
  • The outline view will no longer scroll if your cursor is positioned in an offscreen cell and you click to edit a new row. This was due to Cocoa's spell checking code trying to scroll when we really just wanted it to perform spell checking.
  • If you edit an URL attachment and set its URL to something that isn't a valid URL, you should now get an appropriate error.
  • Unhoisting while you were editing a row with a collapsed ancestor will no longer leave the note of the row visible.
  • Changing the number format in a right-aligned number column should no longer cause that column to display empty until resized.
  • Typing into a field editor on the bottom of the window should scroll correctly now when the typing causes the cursor to move to a new line.
  • Ungroup now works when invoked on collapsed rows.
  • Cutting a row should no longer cause bizarre scrolling when the row selected after the cut has lots of children.
  • Fixed inconsistent capitalization of 'margin' on the Page Setup sheet.
  • Can now change the text background color via the 'Document Color' button on the font panel.
  • Fixed tab control loop on several inspectors and preference panes.
  • Fixed issue of documents not re-opening on application start even when preference is set to re-open previously open documents.

Localization

  • When ending editing in a text area, we now tell the text input manager to mark as complete any text that is entered in that cell. This avoids some problems where Hiragana input can be duplicated if you end editing a cell and then restart editing it.
  • Fixed translation of the "Your software is up to date" string when performing a manual check for updated versions of the application.
  • Integrated a new batch of French localization changes.
  • Integrated a new batch of Japanese localization changes.

Performance

  • Editing the text in large files should be significantly faster now.
  • Creation and destruction of text cells in 10.3 and newer had a serious performance regression in Apple's frameworks due to each cell listening for notification of font system changes. Worked around that and also improved OmniOutliner's response to these notifications.

Printing

  • "Mirror margins on facing pages" wasn't working.
  • Added a workaround for a bug in 10.2's PDF printing support that caused content to get clipped incorrectly when printing. This would cause a portion of the first page to appear at the top of the second page, for example.
  • "Print other background colors" checkbox now affects note background colors.

Software Update

  • Omni Software Update has been changed to collect a few more pieces of information. In particular:
    The 'Learn more...' button on the software update preferences pane in OmniOutliner will let you know exactly what information will be sent to our server. If sending any of this information makes you uncomfortable for any reason, you can disable sending it in that same preference pane.
    • Hardware model: This will let us more easily determine how many users are on laptops vs. desktops, for example.
    • License type: This will let us know how many of our sales go through retail, vs. online store, vs. Apple Pro bundle. No information about your personal license will be transmitted.
    • General latitude & longitude: This will let us know more accurately what countries our users are in, and thus will let us more accurately know what locales we should be supporting better. Again, this is only a general location as reported by the System Preferences time zone setting you made.

Stability

  • In Mac OS X 10.4, dragging a link from Safari into a editing cell could cause an error panel to come up. Apple changed the allowable ways a URL could be represented in a text object to include strings and (preferred) a URL object. We now handle both.

Styles

  • OmniOutliner Pro no longer reorders named styles when saving and reloading files. Previously if one named style inherited from another, the inherited style would always get reordered before the inheriting style.
  • Removing a color from a custom color list will no longer produce an alert panel or leave up the name change sheet.

OmniOutliner for Mac

April 28, 2005

Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" Support

  • Spotlight
    • OmniOutliner now has a Spotlight importer plugin that handles full text indexing and provides many custom metadata keys. For example, you can query for OmniOutliner files that contain more than 4 columns, have a column named "Price" and an "Important" named style. You can set up metadata searches using these custom keys in Finder using cmd-F. Select 'Other...' from the key popup and search for OmniOutliner to see the complete list of extra keys that we support. Note that these keys only show up once you have run this build of OmniOutliner at least once.

Important Notes About This Release

  • Previous releases had a bug where use of the Save All menu item would prevent the next save operation from working correctly. See the below section on saving for more details. We highly recommend updating to this release in order to make sure you are not hit by this bug.
  • This release introduces experimental support for exporting to Keynote 2 themes. (We could already export to Keynote 1 themes.) There is a known limitation that prevents changes to a master slide in the exported file from being reflected in the slides using that master. The workaround is to select all the slides in Keynote and use the 'Reapply Master to Slide' item in the context menu. Once you do that, any future changes to a master slide will be immediately reflected in the slides using that master. See the section below on Exporting for a little more detail. Please report any other bugs you encounter with Keynote 2 export.

Saving

  • We fixed a bug that could cause data loss if you used the Save All menu item: any save operation following a Save All would fail to save the changes made after the Save All operation. The problem was that The next save (except for a Save All) would however reset things such that subsequent saves would work correctly.

Stability

  • If OmniOutliner failed to open a file for some reason, it was likely to crash. This has been fixed.
  • If a document was closed while an attachment label or URL was being edited, OmniOutliner would still attempt to autosave the document a bit later, and would generally crash at that point. This has been fixed.
  • Doing a batch find with an extremely long lines could hang. Now it won't, though doing this can still cause performance problems. Common usage patterns shouldn't hit either case.

Localization

  • OmniOutliner now sports Japanese, French and German localizations. Additionally, the online help is localized in Japanese. Thanks to all those that helped out in the localization effort. If you are interested in helping localize OmniOutliner or another of our applications to your language, please contact info@omnigroup.com.

Performance

  • Another round of performance enhancements for saving files is in place. All our tests now indicate that we are faster than any previous version of OmniOutliner for a wide variety of large documents. If you have a document that is behaving slowly, please send in feedback via the Help ? Send Feedback... menu.
  • The first edit after loading a large file should no longer result in an otherwise abnormal performance hitch.

Importing

  • Long audio capture sessions could bog down your machine. It turns out that working around one QuickTime issue earlier caused us to step on another QuickTime issue where updating the resource on a movie would rewrite a ton of data needlessly. Now we avoid that and can again handle multi-hour high-quality audio captures easily.
  • The XSL plugin support now works for importing XML files with extensions other than "xml" or "xmloutline" (file types defined in the OmniOutliner application). If you sign up as a localization volunteer, you'll likely receive a XSL plugin to read our 'translations' format.
  • Keynote 1 and 2 import works, though there are limitations. Currently we get the bullets and speaker notes, but no styles or attachments. This is expected (and really, we haven't gotten much in the way of requests for anything else). Keynote import is primarily aimed at people that start out in Keynote and decide they want a faster way to flesh out their outline before building a polished presentation.
  • The clipping service will now launch OmniOutliner Professional if it isn't already running. Also, if the clipping fails for some reason, the service will alert you to this fact.
  • Pasting tab-delimited plain text content into an outline would fail with an exception if you had non-text columns in the outline. Now the values in the plain text are converted to the correct types for the columns.
  • Dragging in a webloc file would result in an attachment with default style attributes instead of a style appropriate for the drop location.
  • Editing attachment labels would display incorrectly for some fonts

Exporting

  • Prettier and easier to use Keynote export preferences. The interface for selecting a theme for export is now very similar to what Keynote uses for selecting themes, with a few minor enhancements. Also, you can visually select master slides rather than simply selecting by title. We also display localized preview images for themes and master slides.
  • Experimental: We can now export via Keynote 2 themes. As with Keynote 1 export, only topic and note text is exported. We know people want more, but this is a good first step for people that have purchased iWork. Apple hasn't documented the Keynote 2 file format at all, so we had to muddle our way through. If you see anything unexpected, please let us know.
    • Known issues:
      • The style system in Keynote is pretty touchy about the XML written out and we haven't figured out how to make slides from masters reliably, taking styles into account. The upshot of this is that you need to select all the slides in Keynote and use the 'Reapply Master to Slide' context menu before changing the selected master for a slide (or styling the masters) will change the slides.
  • Exporting to RTF no longer strips trailing newlines from the end of rows

Interface

  • Fixed a typo on the Summary pop-up menu in the Column Type inspector.
  • Dragging in an attachment could result in crazy scrolling previously. We don't like crazy scrolling.
  • It wasn't possible to set the row numbering to an empty string on a specific row if an ancestor of the row had specified a level style with a non-empty value for the prefix or suffix.
  • In locales where the currency symbol should appear as a suffix (Swedish, for example), selecting the currency format in the Column Type inspector for a number column would result in a zero value being displayed as "kr 0,00" when the correct display was "0,00 kr".
    NOTE: If you have an existing document with a column that was incorrectly formatted due to this bug, you'll need to reselect the currency format in the Column Type inspector to reset the format on the column to the corrected version.
  • Tabbing in the Find panel cycles through fields reasonably now.
  • If your left-most column is a checkbox column, hitting return to add a new row will no longer cause the window to lose focus on the outline.
  • Previously, if some but not all of your documents were minimized when you quit OmniOutliner, only those that were minimized would be automatically reopened when you next launched the app. Now all documents open at quit time will be restored on next launch, whether minimized or not. (This is only applicable if you have the appropriate preference set, of course.)
  • When indenting a row causes it to no longer be a section, the focus would previously get lost.
  • Foreign keyboard layouts previously had issues with our inspector shortcuts (French keyboards, for example, have the numbers in the shifted position). Now we base the keyboard shortcuts for those inspectors off keyboard location instead of a specific character. There is more work to do in this area, so let us know what issues you run into.
  • Setting a persistent sort ordering for a column via the main menu wouldn't update the display until you moved the mouse.
  • Persistent sorting should less frequently move stuff around while you are editing your document.
  • When opening a document with more than 20 rows in an unlicensed copy of the application, the window title is adorned with 'Unlicensed' instead of 'Read Only' so it is more clear why you can't edit your document. This was confusing when upgrading a OO2 file since one of the options there is to import the file "Read Only" but selecting "Upgrade" would result in a file that was read-only anyway.
  • Modifications to a row while you are editing a non-text cell (like a date) could previously cause the edits in the non-text cell to revert to the original value.
  • The code that checks whether you've seen the release notes for the current version of the application now handles version numbers with more than one period in them (for instance, 3.0.2).
  • Clicking on the status checkbox on a parent row could fail to set all the children to have the same status as the new parent status if you had sorting enabled on the status value.
  • Using the "Insert date/time" menu items will now work better in date columns.
  • Long blocks of text could result in the view scrolling unexpectedly when you changed editing focus. Did I mention that we don't like crazy scrolling?
  • If you had a corrupt PostScript version of Helvetica in your fonts directory, our inspectors would lay out bizarrely. This problem is gone, but there are still problems if you have corrupt fonts, particularly something like Helvetica.

Styles

  • Copying styles now copies the full effective style rather than just copying locally applied style attributes. This is probably what more people expect and you can still get at the power features in the style system via the Styles View.
  • Copying a row with two or more named styles applied to it and then pasting it would result in a row that had the same named styles in the opposite order.
  • We now handle fonts with the narrow and fixed-pitch attributes. Oops.
  • Changing a column's background color will now immediately update the display
  • Toggling bold/italic in an empty cell should update the inspectors correctly now. There was also an issue where doing several style modifications in a cell with no text selected (just a cursor) wouldn't result in the combination of the modifications -- only the last one would take effect.
  • Un-checking italic in the Appearance inspector now works when you are editing an empty note cell.
  • When the Keyboard Preferences were set to split when creating a new row, the style of the current row wouldn't get cloned to the newly created row if you hit return while editing (worked fine if you just had the row selected).

Printing

  • Styles applied to headers & footers in the Page Setup sheet would print w/o the styles
  • Newlines in headers & footers in the Page Setup sheet could cause the application to hang when printing (or when bringing up Page Setup again).
  • Text in the default style (black) should print out the same black as our handle images.
  • OmniOutliner Pro has fully customizable headers & footers, but in all the work getting that implemented, the default header & footer support that was available in OmniOutliner 2 accidentally got dropped. It's back now; you can enable or disable the default headers & footers in the Page Setup sheet in OmniOutliner

AppleScript

  • The 'select' command now takes a boolean 'extending' argument. This allows you to more easily control whether you replace or extend the selection, particularly in cases were you pass rows from multiple documents to 'select' (did you know that's possible?)
  • Added 'expel ancestors' and 'expel descendants' commands. Both of these take a list of rows as input and return a smaller list of rows. The first removes any row that is an ancestor of another row in the list, while the second does the same for descendants.
  • Added 'leaves' relationship to row and document.
  • Added 'sections' relationship to row and document. The row version returns all the descendants that are also sections.
  • Added 'selected rows' relationship to row. This returns all the selected rows that are descendants of the row.
  • Added 'writable document types' and 'readable document types' property on the application. This can help in dealing with the dynamic document type support in OmniOutliner Professional (due to XSL plugins). These each return a list of records where each record lists the following
    • type: the string identifying this type -- can be passed as the 'as' parameter to the 'save' command.
    • displayName: a human readable name for the file type, according to the user's preferred language
    • fileExtensions: a list of file extensions for this type; the first element is the preferred extension for this type