Molly found these very very small office supplies that somehow or other came with the booth at the Macworld Expo or perhaps were secreted into our space by tiny molemen who visit us from another dimension, at this point I am completely unsure.

The set includes a small stapler, a tiny tape dispenser, and a half-pinted hole punch. Not shown are the petite post-it notes and the confusingly normal-sized paper clips and rubber bands.

Bill is of the opinion that they resemble the application icons of Panic, and I tend to agree — Cabel, if you ever decide to start making office supplies instead of awesome software, it looks like you may have a little (snicker) competition.

I’m all for miniaturization, but please, let’s do so with small (another snicker) doses. Surprisingly, the word nano doesn’t appear to anywhere near the small case these came in.

The Omni Group is looking for a System Guru Ranger to help maintain our Mac OS X servers and workstations. If you’re interested, read through the System Guru Ranger section of our jobs page and send us your resumé!

Recently I was reading about the ad agency that came up with the original AFLAC duck campaign. It’s one of those amazing marketing success stories: AFLAC went ten years struggling to figure out a way for people to remember their name, and with Kaplan Thaler’s commercials their brand awareness went from 12% to 90%.

The duck was the perfect solution to their problem — who doesn’t know the word AFLAC now? — and since the commercials were so memorable and entertaining, they also did a great job of drilling home the secondary message (Hey, we sell health insurance! Ask for it at work!).

Companies usually put so much effort into having their branding campaign tell a story, sometimes with huge budgets and fantastic success (Target’s commercials, for example: We sell all kinds of crap! It’s sparkly! We’re fresh and hip and appealing to a young affluent demographic, unlike that grody old Wal-Mart!), sometimes by creating a revolting animated hunk of snot to act as company mascot (I’m looking at you, Mucinex) — it’s kind of refreshing to see an ad whose main goal is simply to sear the company’s name into your head. AFLAC!

Of course, that concept can be taken too far. You know, that certain product…the one that you apply…directly to your forehead?

Anyway, I was thinking about Omni’s overall brand and what we’re known for. We do try and create continuity in our marketing communications, but I wouldn’t say we adhere to a particularly rigid brand strategy. Which is nice, in a way, because you never hear anyone in Omni’s building utter the words, “Well, I don’t know, that’s not really on message.”

But I do think we could use a lovable, curmudgeonly talking animal of some kind. Perhaps a star-nosed mole!

Or…not.

So what do you think of, when you think of Omni? Do you think of one particular application? A style of interface design, maybe? A group of old-school Mac nerds who still have a pile of NeXT machines in the basement? Why do you like (or dislike) Omni?

As I’m sure many readers of this blog are aware, there is this fine fellow named Edward Tufte who is somewhat of a guru in the field of information visualization. And if you’re at all familiar with his work, then you’ve seen his favorite graphic of all time, the Charles Minard poster of Napoleon’s march on Moscow in 1812:

From Tufte’s website, here is his description of this graphic:

Probably the best statistical graphic ever drawn, this map by Charles Joseph Minard portrays the losses suffered by Napoleon’s army in the Russian campaign of 1812. Beginning at the Polish-Russian border, the thick band shows the size of the army at each position. The path of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in the bitterly cold winter is depicted by the dark lower band, which is tied to temperature and time scales.

Well, since I wanted to play around with OmniPlan, I figured I’d recreate this famous graphic. The result is thusly:

OmniPlan Original
Full Size PDF

I took some very liberal liberties in adapting this historical data to OmniPlan, but I think that it turned out pretty well. Mainly, the completion of a task is used to show much of the army is dead.

This was sparked by the conversation on Tufte’s website about Project Management Graphics (or Gantt Charts), and specifically by the poster near the bottom who was looking to format his gantt chart, but was running into issues using the program he had.

Feedback is very welcome, as I’d love to explore new ideas in presenting information using OmniPlan. I’d also love other data sets to adapt using OmniPlan, so feel free to suggest anything you might think is cool.

Omni’s currently looking for a coder to help us implement our award winning apps. Send in a resumé and join the fun!

I’m hopelessly geeky, but here is an OmniPlan document that shows the dependencies for gaining entrance to Mount Hyjal in the Burning Crusade.

Obviously the estimates will need to be tweaked as each person sees fit. Thanks to Aerdrig for the pretty graph that I used to set up the dependencies.

I typically don’t enjoy waking up early in the morning, whether it’s to go fishing or watch Steve give the keynote address for the Macworld Expo (in fact, seeing as we had to wake up at 4:00 am to catch our flight down here, I avoided the situation entirely by not sleeping at all, hence, no waking up).

As a result, I head on down to the exhibition floor, help set up the booth, and either watch the keynote information on someone else’s website (just like those of you who can’t attend), or mosey on over to the curtained-up Apple pavilion and listen to the audio of the address.

It’s a relaxing and therapeutic environment for me, the floor is not nearly as crowded as when the attendees are present, exhibitors are tirelessly setting up the final preparations for their booths, vacuum cleaners running over the last little bits of debris and there’s an expectant electricity in the air as the last few minutes remain until all chaos breaks loose.

Oh, and apparently it’s the iPhone.

Coming in the next post: details on the OmniFocus Macworld Get-Together Thingie, Which May or May Not Involve Party Hats. Stayed tuned!

In the meantime, I wanted to share this actual email exchange with Omni’s technical support department:

Subject: [Bug Report] Water Outside Building
Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2006 23:41:50 -0800
To: support@omnigroup.com
From: “David”
Ticket: 130265
Product/Component: Omni Development, Inc.
Classification: UI/Usability
Reproducible? Y

Error: A large (4-5 inches deep?) puddle was present outside Omni Group's office earlier tonight.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Wait for large amount of rain and power outage.
3. Exit Zoka onto NE Blakeley Street, heading in the direction of 25th Ave NE.
4. Note lack of lighting outside building, due to power outage.
5. Accidently step into deep pool of water next to Omni Group parking lot.
6. Notice wet pants and shoes.
7. Take sad bus ride home with wet pants.

Expected Results: Stepping onto concrete.
Actual Results: Stepping into deep puddle.

Workaround: Leave Zoka from the opposite door, heading towards 30th Ave NE. This workaround is not optimal, as it requires that the user navigate around University Village Mall in order to reach University of Washington's campus.

Patch:
*** blakeley.street Thu Dec 21 19:48:09 2006
--- blakeley.street Thu Dec 21 23:31:26 2006
***************
*** 1,4 ****
Zoka
OmniGroup
- Puddle
Street
--- 1,3 ----


….and the response from one of our Support Ninjas, Joel:

David-

This is less of an Omni bug and has more to do with the COSFrameworks, as all we really do is take advantage of the easements provided (as do other companies such as Zoka) and when there is a decided *lack* of a leak such as the case here, well, the water tends to pool up and sadly there’s not much we can do about it until COS fixes it.

I have heard tell that in future releases garbage collection may be able to take care of such problems, that remains to be seen as I doubt leaves shall be considered in this schema and I’m not sure if independent GC (as is done now) will be able to or be willing to accept the challenge.

A more simple workaround would be to cross Blakeley somewhere between steps 3 and 5. I see you have no step 2, which is puzzling and preventing me from reproducing this bug here. A much more complex solution would be for Omni and/or Zoka to move to another location (such as ~/Blakeley/ instead of /Blakeley/).

Thanks for the feedback, and hope that helps.

Joel Page
Support Engineer
The Omni Group

Our newest support ninja Michaela brought in some pillows that her friend Roberto spent the last several months crafting for her. Mac nerds can’t be content with a row of regular pillows on the couch, no, no way. Our decor needs to resemble graphical user interfaces whenever possible! Behold, Michaela’s dock in cushiony fabric form!

More (more better) photos are available at Roberto’s site.

I was trying to think of something for which I would be willing to 1) wait in line for 9 hours and 2) stay up past midnight (what can I say, I’m a devoted fan of sleep and sleep-related activities, such as snoring and/or drooling), and here’s what I came up with: if iRobot came out with a new Roomba that could clean your whole house and make you dinner and also do your laundry, I’d wait in line for that sucker. Maybe even for 10 hours.

Sadly, iRobot has done no such thing yet (although I WILL NEVER LOSE HOPE), but for a number of OmniPeople, their own great and glorious much-anticipated product became available to a choice few this Saturday night:

Squii!

It required camping out until midnight, but don’t go feeling too sorry for them; apparently, there was hot chocolate.

And cupcakes. No one told me there would be cupcakes.

I’m pleased to report their dedication paid off…

…and lo, much gaming commenced back at Omni HQ, until FIVE in the MORNING.

Never fear, we have not abandoned our software development in lieu of Wii-ing (admit it, at least one of you was reaching angrily for that Comment button to say BUT WHAT ABOUT OMNIPRODUCTNAME?); we work hard, and we geek hard.

More photos of the Wii-acquisition party here.