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!

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!

More info on our various support options is here.

Omni Group general
Our CEO, Ken Case
OmniFocus
OmniFocus for iPhone
OmniGraffle
OmniPlan
OmniOutliner
OmniWeb

On a somewhat related topic, we’re about to do a major overhaul of our website here at omnigroup.com, and we’d love to hear any suggestions you might have for improving things. Anything from design ideas to requests for specific kinds of content are more than welcome, so feel free to share your thoughts here in the comments!

We’ll be the ones in fancy black OmniFocus t-shirts, assuming the newest Seattle snowfall doesn’t keep us from leaving town. See you there!

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.

Hope to see you there!

It’s been a slightly terrifying effort to get everything packed up and either recycled or readied for moving; remember this thrilling list of Omni Attic Contents? (No? You say you don’t read every single non-useful, non-product related blog entry we post? FINE.) I think we all received about thirty more emails just like that, except even longer, with even weirder items on the list (for instance, copying and pasting directly from a few messages: birthday candles, For Lease sign, “Goblin Green” spray paint, full can of baby powder). Big props to Molly and Trish, our office wranglers who have managed to coordinate all of the moving-related chaos without threatening to kill any employees.

(YET.)

(Also, I feel compelled to tell you that one of the older, more embarrassing games discovered in our dusty game archive shelves is called “Panty Raider”. Game description: you play as Nelson, an innocent bystander forced to help aliens in their search for supermodels in underwear.)

Tomorrow is our official move day, and we’ll be settling into our new location starting next week. If you experience any delays in hearing back from us in the next few days, this is why. In theory we should be up and running again Monday morning, but that assumes no networking SNAFUs, employees wandering around looking for their office, or horrifying discovery that the new building is actually built on an ancient Indian burial ground. WAIT OMNI DO NOT GO INTO THE LIGHT.

Farewell Blakeley building, you have served us well. Sorry about all the cat hair we’re leaving behind.