Oh yeah, that’s right. Who’s got two thumbs and represents the most pathetic use case? THIS gal.

Anyway, I thought some of you might be interested in seeing how some of our iPad development work is happening for OmniGraphSketcher. Now obviously we do a lot of mockups in what is surely the world’s best program for creating IA/UX designs, OmniGraffle. But when it comes to envisioning how something works on a piece of hardware no one can actually use yet, a lot of people here are going low-tech to try and figure it out.

Omni’s lead developer for OmniGraphSketcher, Robin, created some iPad-sized paper templates for sketching up ideas.

He didn’t stop there, though. No sir, he most certainly did NOT. Here’s his custom graph paper notebook, which he cut to iPad dimensions using a table saw.

I want to say that’s sort of crazy, except our own CEO Ken Case created a terrifyingly accurate faux iPad using a 3D printer. It—well, it even has a little Omni logo on it. And a 30-pin dock connector. And . . . look, it’s just very, very realistic and I’m a little worried about how much sleep everyone is getting, okay?

Here’s Robin’s own iPad-sized hardware prototype (!) with a variety of UI element ideas designed by our User Experience lead, William Van Hecke.

That’s what Robin had me look at the other day, while asking a series of questions. I’m sure he regretted it almost instantly.

Robin: “So let’s say you want to turn this point from a circle into a square. What would you do?”

Me: “Buhhhhh. Dur. I touch it?”

Robin (soothingly): “Okay. You see a little blue circle around the element. Then what do you do?”

Me: “Uhhhhhrrrr. I’d . . . maybe I’d press real hard. Like this.” *smoosh*

Robin: “Um . . . well, okay. You get a dialogue that says ‘copy’.”

Me: “OH GOD NO THAT’S WRONG ISN’T IT MY HEAD MY HEAD MY HEEAAAD.”

Robin (brisk clap): “Okay then! What say we try this again later.”

Lastly, here’s Robin interacting with his fauxPad.

I think he’s making color adjustments. On a fake, printed-out inspector that Bill made. To the document that is actually just a piece of paper. Man, software development is weird.

Merlin Mann: Advanced Secrets of the Omnifocus Ninja

Thursday through Saturday afternoons from 1:30-2:30pm, Merlin Mann (43 Folders, MacBreak Weekly, You Look Nice Today) will stealthily rappel into the Omni Group’s booth (#760) to demonstrate the arcane and deadly methods of the OmniFocus Ninja. Long thought by many to be an elaborate myth or hoax, these ancient productivity moves unlock the hidden power of Omni’s award-winning task management app.

• Working the bookmarklet
  Friction-free task management right from your iPhone
• Tricking-out your Perspectives
  Slice and dice your work into perfect-sized cubes
• Novel uses for on-hold projects
  Out of sight means out-of-mind — until you need it
• Location, Location, Location!
  Using the power of location-awareness in your contexts
• BONUS: Five more tiny OmniFocus tricks almost nobody knows about
  (seeeeeekr1t!)

Hope to see you there!

• Jellybeans in novelty flavors: Black Licorice, Cumin, Uncoated Aspirin, Gorgonzola

• Foam lightbulb squeeze toy with “I CAN HAZ BRITE IDEAZ?” imprinted on side

• Cadmium-coated fountain pen

• Baby Alive “Wets & Wiggles” doll

• Custom hemp/lanolin blend t-shirt

• Scratch-n-sniff iPads

If you’re going to Macworld, make sure to stop by #760 for some actual non-crappy tradeshow stuff, including an Omni Geek-Friendly Field Notebook. For those that buy our software at the show you’ll receive a 1GB USB stick, lovingly hand-crafted from both bamboo and awesome.

We hope to see you there!

OmniPad

Robin!

From the course description:

In OmniGraffle Professional 5 Essential Training, Jason Osder shows how to go from idea to fully developed illustration with this powerful diagramming tool for the Mac. OmniGraffle is designed to handle everything from diagrams, process charts, and web site mockups, to page layouts, and even info-rich map graphics. Jason demonstrates how to organize this wide variety of documents using canvases and layers, and work with basic diagram elements such as shapes, lines, and text. He also shares timesaving techniques, such as using pre-made stencils, snapping for auto alignment, and auto layouts, so users can create documents quickly and efficiently. Advanced skills for the professional user are also introduced, including adding interactivity and developing custom shapes. Exercise files are included with this course.

Topics Include:
€ – Creating and manipulating shapes
€ – Finding and adding stencils
€ – Applying diagram styles
€ – Importing content
€ – Displaying diagrams in Presentation mode

Duration:
- 1.75 Hours

You can learn more about Lynda.com’s subscription programs here. Enjoy!

Anyway, if you happen to have made some resolutions this year, how do you plan to stay on top of them? With some software, perhaps? Maybe even some Omni software? (Is my incessant eyebrow-waggling and elbow-jabbing getting annoying yet? HMMM?) Let us take a look at some of our fine productivity applications, with creating and managing resolutions in mind.

First, OmniGraphSketcher. If you’re anything like me the idea of spending your free time creating graphs is about as appealing as, oh, creating pie charts. Which is to say, not all that appealing. Unless there’s actual pie involved.

At first I wasn’t sure how to translate my goals into graphs, but the more I thought about it the more ideas popped into my mind. Here’s an example of the progress I’ve made towards one of my 2010 resolutions, which is to run a half marathon on February 28th:

These charts document the training runs I did in November and December, with the bar chart representing the miles I ran, and the line graph along the top representing my pace.

Now, as our lead OmniGraphSketcher developer gently chided me, this isn’t exactly a best practice example, because they have different y-scales. Which I think means I should have created separate graphs for pace and mileage to make it more clear what I’m analyzing. But I kind of like the way it looks as is, so you’ll just have to pardon my rebellion.

I’ll be honest, I hadn’t played with OmniGraphSketcher much before putting these documents together, and what do you know, the things we say about it are actually true! It’s super easy to use, it’s nowhere near as painful as certain other programs that rhyme with Shmexel, and the results are very pretty even if you’re kind of a mouthbreather when it comes to data visualization. And hey, how motivating is it to actually see the steps you’ve made towards completing a goal? Much more rewarding than, say, counting your foot blisters.

Moving on to OmniFocus! OmniFocus is probably the most obvious choice for goal management, and the key to making the most of it is turning those high-level ambitions into actionable next steps. There’s, you know, a whole school of thought on how to do this (you may have heard of a little system called Getting Things Done?), but the idea is to spend some time thinking about what you need to do in order to keep that resolution. A nebulous, undefined goal doesn’t do you much good, right?

Bad:

Better:

One option for managing your big goals in OmniFocus is to keep an action simply titled “Review 2010 Resolutions” (or whatever), and set it to repeat every few months. Note that dragging a project or action into the note field of another will create a link back to the first item, so you can add little shortcuts from your resolution items to their respective projects.

Lastly, OmniGraffle! Perhaps unsurprisingly, the overall Omni response to my request for personal goal-focused information that I could slap on our public blog was not unlike a Zork session:

>SEND EMAIL
Time passes.

Eventually after some truly pathetic begging on my part (the things I do for this blog! And you thought I just posted silly links and typos!), one of our esteemed Support Ninjas, Kris, sent over a really neat OmniGraffle document that’s modeled after a chalkboard he and his partner have in their home. The top and bottom circles represent their individual goals, with their mutual goals in the yellow center circle.

Goals inside the circle are targeted for 2010, goals on the border are within the next year or two, and anything outside of the circle is scheduled for the two to five year range. “We use this to be clear about what our priorities are and where we’re at with them—not to mention all the secret juju that comes from visualization,” said Kris, right before he whipped a throwing star at my head for mocking his desire to learn the banjo.

He also shared these tips:

“The cool thing about having a Graffle doc of this is that it’s easy to edit, rearrange, re-prioritize and add new things as they come up… then reflect those changes at home. I can keep a PDF copy of the file with me so that when I’m out shopping (for instance) I can pull up the ol’ Goal Board and evaluate the purchase against my priorities. Also, the actual Graffle doc has this really cool capability where you can assign an action to an object—clicking an object (with the selection tool) will open a URL, a file, run an applescript, etc. I use this to link to things that I desperately want—again, the mystical power of visualization. I also use this to link to my OmniFocus projects that reflect these goals.”

Awesome, right? Don’t ever question the power of visualization, people.

So! How about you folks? Do you have any tips to share for making all your MMX dreams come true?

In the current version of OmniFocus, there’s some wonky behavior with stalled projects. (Yes: wonky. It’s a technical term.) It’s something we plan to fix, but in the meantime I’ll walk you through the problem and a suggested workaround.

Let’s say you’re reviewing your stalled projects by choosing “Stalled” in the sidebar filter in order to display all projects without any available actions. In my example, I’ve got a project titled “December fitness events”, and sadly for my fitness, it is empty.

Woe.

I’d like to go ahead and add an action to this project, but when I click the project and hit return, poof! It disappears altogether.

Now, I could take this as a sign that I wasn’t meant to do any fitness events in December and instead focus my attention on devouring as many holiday-themed cookies as humanly possible, but here’s the thing: the project isn’t gone, it just thinks it has an action item now. Even though it’s an empty action, because you haven’t yet typed anything, the project is officially no longer stalled.

So, here’s a workaround for that issue, as suggested by our super-smart Support Ninja, Kris:

First, set your Clean Up preferences (in Data Preferences) to “Clean Up Inbox items which have: Both a Project and a Context”.

Next, set your sidebar filter to “Stalled” as before. As you review everything and decide to add new actions to the empty projects, bring up the Quick Entry window and add the action there.

Since you’ve told OmniFocus to keep things in your inbox until both the project and the context have been set, you can assign an item to a stalled project and your project will remain stalled until the context is set as well. The purpose here being that you can continue to see the list of stalled projects (ie, no more mid-workflow disappearing acts) until you’re done organizing your actions.

Once you’re done reviewing your stalled projects, you can return to the inbox and assign contexts for everything. Voila! Your actions get filed into their proper locations, and your stalled projects are no longer.

I hope that was at least marginally useful for you OmniFocus users, even if you haven’t encountered this particular issue before. And hey, would you like to see more workarounds/tips/tricks in our blog? Let us know, all suggestions are more than welcome.

Oh wait that’s a Keystone® Light. Never mind.

Anyway, for those planning to register soon, the nice people at IDG have given us a discount code to pass along to you guys. This exclusive code, which I have carefully copied and pasted below using special tongs, provides the first 100 people to use it with a free expo hall pass or 15% off select conference programs.

The code is AGO18988, and you’ll want to 1) guard it with your LIFE, and 2) enter it at the top of the registration page (which you can access by going to the Macworld 2010 website and clicking the green “Register Now” button).

You can also access the discount via this handy-dandy link.

We hope to see you there! We’ll be the ones complaining about how our feet hurt, despite having ponied up for the fancy carpet padding that’s apparently filled with endangered chinchilla pelts, based on the per-day rental price. Viva Macworld Expo!

But Omni, you’re saying. White papers are so boooooring. They use words like “extensible” and “data-driven” and most of them are just cheesy marketing materials in disguise. WAHHH.

Listen, I can’t hear you when you use that tone of voice. And stop worrying, because this is a totally useful document written by our stellar documentation folks, and the marketing weasels didn’t even touch it. (I wanted more cowbell, but would they listen? NO.)

The white paper gives a thorough explanation of how the GTD concepts of Capture, Process, Organize, Do, and Review are handled by OmniFocus, and you don’t need to have any previous understanding of the Getting Things Done system to read it. As a sometimes-committed, sometimes-not OmniFocus user myself, I found this white paper really helpful and inspiring.

The good folks at DavidCo not only helped us make sure the white paper was accurate, but are also promoting OmniFocus as the recommended Mac GTD solution from their online store. We want to thank them for working with us and making OmniFocus available to a wider GTD audience.

So what are you waiting for? Go forth and download, and get some best-practice ideas for making the most of your OmniFocus document.

• A six-part series of short video tutorials for OmniGraffle at Alexander Interactive.

• At Konigi.com, version 3 of their OmniGraffle Wireframe Stencils.

• For those who manage web development projects, a free OmniPlan template from Simon Surtees, and a method for using OmniPlan to price a freelance web dev job from Journal-ism.

• From John Kendrick’s blog, a post on using people as contexts in OmniFocus. (As for me, I only have one personal context in my OmniFocus document, titled “Clive Owen”. Its related actions: “Heave wistful sigh while absentmindedly twirling hair”, “Rent Sin City . . . again“, “Doodle I ♥ Clive on Trapper Keeper”, etc.)

• A nicely balanced account of Jeremy’s experience with both OmniFocus and Things.

• And just for fun and general awesomeness, a recipe for peanut butter bacon cookies. Duuuuuuuuuuuuude.