Hopefully you caught the news earlier today: OmniGraphSketcher is now final. Congratulations to the OGS team! And hey, if you’ve been wanting desperately to buy OmniGraphSketcher for all your graph sketching needs but couldn’t do so because our store didn’t support PayPal, you’d best be buying yourself a lottery ticket because THIS IS YOUR LUCKY DAY.

On a totally unrelated note, let’s talk about iPhones! Specifically, what’s the most useful/fun/cool thing you’ve done with your phone lately? I put this question to some of the Omni folk, and here are their answers:

Kris, Support Ninja: “I’ve settled many a “Where should we go?” hive-mind-cluster-fart by popping open the Yelp app and searching for nearby options. I’ve also bookmarked my own lil’ Zagat Guide of the local places that I love, and places to check out when I travel. Being able to click a link to call for reservations, get a map with directions, or view real people’s reviews make this app tremendously useful for me.”

Aaron, Sysadmin: “When we were in a car wreck I felt like I was living in one of those silly Apple ads. First I took out the phone to call the police (everyone was OK, BTW) followed by my insurance company. Then I snapped some pictures of the scene and damage to email to the claims adjuster. Finally, after everything was all written up I used the Google maps app to find the closest tow truck company and call them to come pick up my busted rig.”

Tim, VP Software Development: “I recently bought Jaadu VNC which lets you connect to your Mac’s screen on the phone. So, my kids are in the office and I’m out sitting on the couch.  I connect to my machine and use Jaadu’s keyboard to start using the “say” command in Terminal to freak them out.  I live in the future, where technology is good for evil.”

Bill, User Experience Lead: “I recently ditched my real camera because the iPhone 3G S camera is quite adequate for any photo or video I care to take. When I’m listening to the Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me! podcast, I like to switch over to YouTube and catch up on whatever current event they’re talking about, because I usually have no idea. Uh, I have also used the Amazon app to photograph, research, and buy a book. While standing in the physical bookstore. *shame*”

My own example: last week I was parking in a totally unfamiliar part of Seattle, so I used Maps to drop a pin at my car’s location. When I was ready to go home, instead of wandering the streets for hours on end weeping hysterically, I just pulled up walking directions to find my way back. Not only that, but since I’m so directionally challenged I find instructions like “walk south” to be completely meaningless, I used the compass to keep me heading the right way. OH IPHONE I LOVE YOU.

How about you guys? Have any how-my-phone-improved-my-life stories to share?

The OmniFocus team has been hard at work lately, and we’re geeked to let you know that version 1.5 for iPhone and iPod touch is now available. OmniFocus 1.5 for iPhone and iPod touch leverages many of the new capabilities in the iPhone OS 3.0 software update, including cut, copy and paste, integrated Maps and more. If you read Brian’s article on location-based contexts, you know how OmniFocus works with Location Services—OmniFocus 1.5 for iPhone and iPod touch now displays nearby context categories of possible tasks using a map. Just touch a pin to see all the tasks within the corresponding context category. 

NOW YOUR TASKS WILL HAUNT YOU WHEREVER YOU GO! Er, I mean, smell the unparalleled productivity!

The app also now features a new Search screen for easily searching through projects and actions, and a new Repeat screen enables the quick set-up of repeating actions and projects. Web links can render directly inside the application itself for quicker viewing. Other new features include “due date” display for each Action list, and direct feedback email to the Omni Group from within the application itself.

What are you waiting for? To the App Store with you, mister/missy, and grab the new version.

I wanted to do a blog post about what I regard as (in my humble opinion) the single most awesome feature in OmniFocus for iPhone. It’s also a feature that I’m not sure everyone knows about. Time to change that!

OmniFocus for iPhone plugs into part of the iPhone OS called “Location Services”; this lets it figure out where in the world you’re located. The location-finding is most accurate if you’re using a device that has GPS (an iPhone 3g or the new 3gs, for example), but if you’ve got a first-generation iPhone or an iPod Touch, the device can also figure out your location by seeing which cellphone towers and/or WiFi networks it can find. (WiFi is actually more accurate than the cell-tower method, at least here in the US; overseas, the situation may be different.)

Okay, this is cool and all, but how is it useful in OmniFocus? Well, your contexts can also have location information associated with them. By combining the two, OmniFocus can do Google map searches to help you figure out what you can get done based on where you currently are. Tap the “Nearby Contexts” button – it looks like a crosshair on the toolbar – and OmniFocus will show you where you can go to accomplish actions in the contexts it has location info about.

To assign location info to one of your contexts, do the following:
Tap “Contexts” on OmniFocus for iPhone’s home screen.
Tap the “Edit” button in the upper right of the screen.
Tap the context you want to edit.
Tap one of the location buttons described below and enter your information.

The various kinds of Location info supported are:

Current location – where you are right now, expressed as latitude/longitude.

Contact - The address assigned to the contact you choose is used.
Address – Enter an address. Anything that works in the iPhone Maps application works here; street address of your home, or even something as general as “Beijing, China”.
Business Search – Specific business names and general categories are both supported; OmniFocus will return the closest result it can find. If you have a favorite drug store where you get prescriptions filled, you could enter the name; if you travel a lot, you could just enter “Pharmacy” and get results in multiple cities.
Always Available – This setting is good for contexts like “Phone” – ones that are generally available no matter where you are.

In any case, once your contexts are set up, you can tap the nearby button and get a handy list that looks like this:

(A tap the button on the right side of each header takes you to the Maps application so you can navigate to the location, by the way.)

I’ve added a list of location-based contexts that folks here at Omni use to get folks started. I’ve also created a thread over on our forums where folks can swap further ideas – we’re doing a google map search behind the scenes, so using their search operators, you can do some neat tricks with this stuff!

Suggestions:
Home
Office
Phone (always available, if you’re on an iPhone)
Grocery
Pharmacy
Post Office
Music Store
Book Store
Apple Store
Cities you visit frequently

Hi, all!

In case you missed it, we shipped OmniFocus 1.5 last November, adding synchronization between any number of OmniFocus for Mac and OmniFocus for iPhone databases, archiving, view presets, style preferences, and more. You’ll definitely want to make sure you’re using this latest version, which you can grab from the OmniFocus page.

We’re also hard at work on OmniFocus 1.6, and if you’re interested in trying out the latest ongoing (possibly unstable) builds, you can access the sneaky peeks at the sneaky peek page. It adds support for projects which automatically complete when all tasks within the project are complete, makes contexts completely optional (actions without contexts are no longer considered unavailable), lets you filter your inbox and no context lists, and lets you view all your due or flagged items in a single list.

In other news, we are working closely with the The David Allen Company to promote OmniFocus as a GTD enabled software solution. What does this mean for you? Well, hopefully our working relationship will help us better support those of you who are using the GTD methodology, by having an ongoing connection with the folks at David Allen & Co. and staying in touch with their latest thinking. As we look to future versions of OmniFocus, we want to help you get the most out of your GTD-specific workflows, and provide more GTD resources that supplement our software.

(Of course, you don’t have to be a GTD fan to use OmniFocus: we think we provide a very useful set of features for other task management styles, and we’re continuing to make improvements there as well.)

COME SEE US AT THE GTD SUMMIT
We also wanted you to know that Omni will be at the GTD Summit in San Francisco on March 11-13. If you’re interested in attending, you can access a special discount of 35% (more than $800) off the Summit fee. To register, go to the registration page and enter the coupon code “Summit35″.

You may wish to view a short invitation from David, and you can find more details about the event at www.gtdsummit.com. We hope to see you there!

Lastly, we’re thrilled to announce that this past weekend we sold our 50,000th copy of OmniFocus for iPhone! Thank you so much to all the folks who have helped us immeasurably by sending in suggestions, reporting issues, and recommending OmniFocus to friends.

Why, hello again! Michaela here. I don’t know if you noticed that fancy title, but there are two new OmniFocus videos available from our friends at ScreenCastsOnline.

The first, found here, is on the basics of OmniFocus. It has some new information not found in the Quick Start video and is a great starting point.

The second, found here, is on OmniFocus advanced usage and the iPhone. It’s a special double-length show that covers topics such as Syncing, the Inspectors, Growl integration, Perspectives, Clippings, and integrating with other applications like Mail and iCal.

As always, the ScreenCastsOnline team does fantastic work. We thank them.

Do check it out!

It is true what many of you have heard: Our buddy, OmniFocus for iPhone, has an update. In this update, we corrected a few things including:

• A bug in which a blank screen could appear after creating a new item
• A bug in which OmniFocus could become unresponsive after converting an action to a project
• A new Settings icon to avoid potential confusion with Apple’s Settings application
• Saved Zion from the machines

Okay, maybe we’re still working on that last one, but you can find a full list of changes, or check out the application in iTunes, here. (This link opens in iTunes.)

Thanks to everyone for their help!

Hey, sneaky peek fans! Hot off the servers, get an early look at OmniFocus 1.1 here. OmniFocus 1.1 adds support for synchronizing between computers and with OmniFocus for iPhone and iPod touch.

The sneaky peek page allows you to grab all of our most recent alpha builds for this release, and if you’d like to give it a try we recommend you update to a new build on a fairly frequent basis — and don’t forget to turn on frequent backups in your OmniFocus preferences, Just In Case.

Enjoy!

The Omni Group is proud to announce the birth of a new bouncing baby app: OmniFocus for iPhone. Don’t let its size fool you. It may fit in your pocket, but it’s got all the same classy and nifty that you get with OmniFocus for Mac. For instance:

• Full featured as a stand alone iPhone app, or…
• Sync wirelessly with OmniFocus 1.1 on your Mac (via MobileMe or generic WebDAV)
• Same powerful management of your projects, contexts and actions
• Easy access to special lists such as Due Soon, Overdue, and Flagged

We figured that as long as we were building an iPhone app, we should take advantage of some of the neat stuff you can do on the phone. Here are some of the iPhone-only features that are shipping in the application right now:

• Dynamic location-aware action lists: Let OmniFocus for iPhone put together a list of actions that can be accomplished near to your current location!
• Photo capture: Save quick snapshots to your OmniFocus inbox. If you’re using sync, these will show up in OmniFocus on your Mac.
• Voice notes: Sometimes it’s just faster to record a quick voice note to yourself.

There’s more information and links to the App Store on the OmniFocus for iPhone page. Also, our very own Michaela has put together a great intro video for OmniFocus for iPhone. If you’re curious about the application and would like to see more before purchasing, check it out now. It’s a 26MB 15MB download so you might want to option-click that link to start it downloading rather than wait for the page to load it in fully.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Explanations up front: As difficult as it may be to imagine, some of here at the Omni Group are avid gamers, and one of those games we play happens to be Dungeons & Dragons. As it so happens, Wizards of the Coast have come out with a new version of D&D, the 4th edition since its launch many years ago, and there are some new aspects that wound up dovetailing quite nicely into OmniFocus and its handling of repeating tasks and projects.

Now, one of the things about playing this particular game is that there can be an awful lot of information to remember, and at times it’s darn near impossible to remember it all, so one is perpetually diving into the Player’s Handbook to find information, and if you’re at all familiar with the Player’s Handbook, then you know as well as I do that finding information in that tome can be difficult at best. To be fair, the new edition has much nicer charts, tables, and graphs, but so far as important wordage goes, things tend to be scattered throughout the book.

We have been using OmniGraffle in the past to create and maintain character sheets, and I myself have endeavored to get as much information as possible onto the character sheet, to avoid the long searching in the PHB. With this new version, I immediately started thinking about using the notes feature in OmniGraffle Professional for this, referencing a document on my laptop to makes things quite a bit easier.

Then I got to thinking about the new feature in the 4th edition, the idea of powers that can be used at will, or once during an encounter, or once daily, that sort of thing. Wizards is apparently selling decks of cards with these powers on them, when in play you turn them over so you know that you’ve used that particular encounter or daily power. Aha! I thought to myself, I can make them in OmniGraffle, and put some actions on them so that when I poke said power “card”, they dim out or some such thing.

All of this of course, requires me bringing my laptop to the gaming session. If only there was some smaller device, that was on my person pretty much at all times, that I could use instead…

Enter OmniFocus into the brainstorm.

While it may seem to be a very odd pairing, a game and a GTD application, it turns out that the basic document interface to OmniFocus is very useful in listing attributes and abilities, with full descriptive text explanations in the notes. And, making repeating projects and tasks for the aforementioned encounter and daily powers winds up being a very effective method for tracking what’s been used, both during the actual gaming session as well as looking back over a long period of time to see how you made the most use of what ability and what-not.

After bouncing this idea off of some co-workers that also play, here’s what I wound up with:

My ‘character’ in OmniFocus is a folder of various projects (all parallel, although I suspect it doesn’t matter) to break down into the various aspects of the character. For instance, “Character Information” is a project and such things as name and race and class are just tasks within that project. “Race Features” is a separate project, with whatever bonuses I get for being a dwarf listed as tasks, with full descriptions from the Player’s Handbook entered in as the note for the task. This way, pretty much anything I need to immediately know about my character when playing is right there, in context.

At this point, I could easily be using OmniGraffle or OmniOutliner or even TextEdit or the Notes application on the iPhone to display this information in a more effective way than bookmarking my PHB or committing to memory. However, it quickly became evident that repeating projects and tasks would be ‘the win’ when set up as my combat powers.

In the 4th Edition, your character gets a certain set of powers to use in combat or while adventuring. Some of these are considered to be “at will”, in that you can use them at any time and as often as desired. Some other powers you may only use once during an encounter with a monster, and some you may only do once per day.

As a result, I have a project for my At-Will Powers, and a project for my Encounter Powers, and a project for my Daily Powers. My At-Will project is not repeating, however the tasks in it that represent these things that my character can do are set to repeating. My Encounter and Daily projects are set to repeat, but the tasks within are not.

So, in the course of gaming if I use my at-will “Cleave” power, I mark that task as completed, and get another one in its place in case I need to use it next round. If I use say, “Spinning Sweep”, which is an Encounter Power, then I mark the task I have representing it as complete, and cannot use it again. At the end of the encounter I go ahead and mark the project I have for my Encounter Powers as complete, and since it’s a repeating project, I get a brand new version of it for the next baddie that might come my way.

Rinse and repeat, and after six months or perhaps a year I can also go back and look at my completed items and see what I’ve been using the most, that sort of thing.

Best yet, as I alluded to somewhere way further up in this post, is that it works really wonderfully on the iPhone, the syncing between the desktop version of OmniFocus and the iPhone/iPod Touch version means that I have a very rich and informative document about my roleplaying character, which in turn winds up being fairly interactive, all in my pocket.

We all thought it would make for a good blog post, hope you enjoyed reading it.