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.

Welcome to the third, and for this week anyway, final installment of “You Ask, We Answer!”. Brought to you by Diet Coke and the letter Q.

(Q for Qwality!)

Ayjay asked, many Mac developers have moved away from the use of drawers (especially now that Apple has taken them away from Mail) but you guys still feature drawers-a-plenty. What do you like about drawers? Have you thought about any other ways of implementing the functionality that drawers give you?

Ooh, good question. I had to call in the troops for help on this one, since my opinions on drawers are mainly limited to the kind you put your socks in. Ken, our CEO, and Bill, our UI Lead, put their heads together to answer you:

‘We like drawers because they are a great place for content that belongs to the main window but doesn’t necessarily need to be there all the time. They’re great for “source lists”, from which you can choose what to view in the main window, like OmniGraffle’s canvases or OmniWeb’s tabs. Perhaps best of all, unlike a sidebar, you can show, hide, or resize a drawer all day long without affecting the dimensions or layout of the main content. And in Omni apps, you can move the drawer to whichever side of the window you prefer by Option-clicking the drawer button in the toolbar.

The problem with drawers, of course, is that the things just don’t look modern. While the rest of Mac OS X interface was getting the sleek plastic or metal treatment, drawers are still as pinstripey, space-wastey, and noisy as they were the day they were introduced. Unless we want to cobble together and maintain some sort of custom fake drawer ourselves (or—gasp!—Apple actually updates drawers’ appearance), we’re going to have to get away from drawers eventually.

In meetings for our new products, we’ve talked about how to deal with this problem, and we think we may have come up with a good hybrid of the useful drawer and the sleek sidebar. You may end up seeing the first incarnation of it in OmniFocus, if we can do it right.’

Spencer says, I have had no luck at all with storing OmniGraffle documents in Subverson. The icon seems to contain an illegal character or something.

Here’s the response from our OmniGraffle tech support/product manager NINJA EXTRAORDINAIRE:

‘This is likely due to OmniGraffle saving the files out as packages, which other file systems can have difficulty dealing with.

OmniGraffle will automatically save a file out to a package if an image or external graphic is present in the document; there is a hidden preference to avoid this behavior that can be enabled from the command line. To get OmniGraffle to always save as a “flat” file (which will have no problems on other filesystems), open up Terminal.app and paste this in:

defaults write com.omnigroup.OmniGraffle PrivateGraffleFlatFile 0

Afterwards, new documents should always save as a monolithic file, you may have to perform a “Save As” for existing documents to convert them.’

Man, I’m loving this whole ‘fob off the hard questions on other Omni employees’ gig. What else have you got, commenters? Bring. It. On! *spirit hands*

Matt wants to know, Do you guys plan on fixing RSS anytime soon? Its a sometimes it work, sometimes it doesn’t work symptom. Usually I have to relaunch OmniWeb to get it to recheck RSS feeds- it doesn’t do it by itself even though I have it set to recheck the feeds every hour.

Dang, this one’s less fun to answer. Turns out we’ve seen this issue and we’re able to reproduce it. It’s a bug that we’re hoping to fix in an upcoming release, after the 5.5.1 update. Sorry about that!

Conor asks, Can you tell me if OmniFocus will liason with OmniPlan so that you can plan projects in OmniPlan and then download your personal tasks into OmniFocus? Also, are there any plans to allow Wintel users to edit OmniPlan? I work in a mixed-platform office and, while I do most of the project planning on my mac, it would be nice to enable other employees to check off tasks, etc.

We would love for OmniFocus and OmniPlan to work together that way, but I think it’s safe to say that they won’t for OmniFocus 1.0. We’re trying to limit the scope to what we can actually get out the door in a (hopefully) reasonable amount of time, but it’s definitely on the plate for future consideration.

As for Wintel users…well, we likely won’t ever have a cross-platform version of OmniPlan, but you can use OmniPlan to export to .mpx, .mpp, and MSPDI .xml for sharing with Microsoft Project and other project management applications. You can also export to a .csv file for import into Excel, and if people just need to see the data, not update it, you can export the Gantt, outline or both into several different image formats (PDF, PNG, TIFF, JPEG). And! You can export to html – either a single table of tasks, or a mini-website with a Gantt chart, tables, and calendar files that can be imported into iCal, Outlook or other calendaring apps.

Thanks for all your questions, folks, and if I didn’t get to yours this week, my apologies. Please stay tuned for an Exciting Announcement (note: your excitement may vary) about OmniWeb I will be posting later today. Same blog time, same blog channel.

Happy Halloween, Omni blog readers! Troy is wearing a purple wig today, James is sporting some bright orange socks with bats on them (although for James that’s a fairly typical fashion choice), Ken is wearing a lab coat, and Greg’s son Miles has been transformed into…well, Darth Toddler:

Hee. I love the thumbs up gesture, there.

Okay! On to more questions, before all our pumpkins turn into…uh…chariots, or something.

Dan asks, Is there any sort of official list of ideas and feature requests for future releases? Have you ever thought of doing something like an “OmniProduct Focus Group,” or is this something that would be completely unnecessary?

We definitely have an internal system for tracking ideas, feature requests, and bugs, and assigning things to specific target releases for all of our products. I’m guessing you’re wondering more about a publicly available list, so you can see what’s already been suggested? We don’t have such a thing, exactly, but you can see what other people are talking about on our forums, and add your input there. Otherwise, we always welcome feedback via email, so please feel free to send us your requests.

As for a focus group, we’ve never hosted a formal type of group (the kind where you get free soda and people with clipboards peer at you from behind one-way mirrors), although we have asked people to join an “Alpha Brute Squad” where they get a really early look at our software (sometimes when it’s in a mildly terrifying, devouring-its-own-tail state of bugdom!) and have a chance to provide feedback on features and UI before it goes into public beta.

I don’t yet know what we’ll be doing for OmniFocus, but I’d recommend signing up on this mailing list if you’re interested in potentially being tapped for Brute Squad duty.

Kirk wonders, Any chance of transferring an Outliner license to Focus when it comes out?

Sort of. We will be offering discounted OmniFocus licenses for OmniOutliner customers, so while you won’t be able to transfer one app license to another, you won’t be charged full price either. We haven’t made any final pricing decisions, but we definitely recognize that we need cross-product discounting.

David asks, How do I enter curved text in OmniGraffle? That is, if I want a line of text to follow a curved path (like a squiggle or around a circle/arc), can it be done [...]?

Sorry, you can’t created curved text in OmniGraffle (although you should be able to copy and paste it in from a graphic created elsewhere). If you don’t have Illustrator, as you mentioned, maybe something like LineForm or EazyDraw would work?

Dan asked another question: is there a story for the change in the status of Omni’s apps that come bundled with most Macs, with the switch to Intel? (Specifically, the addition of OmniOutliner to all consumer Macs and the loss of OmniGraffle.)

If there’s a story, only Apple knows it. We don’t really have any influence over what Apple decides to include, or not include, in their hardware – we just review what they ultimately propose and decide if we want to say yea or nay. The expanded bundle deal for Outliner has been great, although in general I wish our software were easier to discover. You know, instead of being all tidily tucked away in the Applications folder, maybe it could be…sitting in the Dock? (Apple? I’m just sayin’.)

Nik asked several questions, most of which I’ve sent on to tech support, but here’s one for the blog: Is it possible to save an OmniOutliner document so that it’s JUST the XML file and doesn’t have the bundle “wrapper” around it? (Then I could check it into source control and stuff.)

You can check it into source control, I’m told. OmniOutliner supports CVS and SVN, so you can check it in as is, folders and all.

All righty then! This concludes today’s Q&A With Omni. I may follow up with a third and final post on Thursday, so if you have any more questions, leave them in the fancy comment box.

And now, I’m off to help my son trample large metropolitan areas. RAARRRRR!

Oh crap, you mean you’re actually going to ask, like, real questions? Well FINE. Make me work, why don’t you.

(Note: if you need technical support on any of our apps, it’s best to send it to our support team using Send Feedback.. under the Help menu in your software. I may not get to *everyone’s* question this week.)

Richard asks, How can I get OmniWeb to open up RSS links in Vienna, my preferred RSS reader?

We have a current OmniWeb bug described as:

“Request: Allow news icon to send RSS feed subscriptions to outside program/external viewer [newsfeed default]“ 

This should be implemented in 5.5.2, an update that should be available soon (I’m not sure exactly when, but not too long from now).

Matthew has some Omni software on his laptop, and now that his employer has provided him with a PowerMac, he wants to know how to use those same apps via network licensing.

There is a lengthy explanation of our different licensing types here, but in a nutshell, you’ll just need to install your Omni application of choice on your Power Mac (grab the download from our website), then use the same license you’ve been using on your laptop. You cannot, however, run two copies of the licensed software using one license at the same time – otherwise, both of your computers will explode.

(Okay, they won’t technically “explode”, but it would violate our licensing policy and that would mean that somewhere, a kitten would cry. Won’t you please, please think of the kittens?)

Edward would like to know, Are there any “secret” ways to get OmniWeb to run quicker?

Down at the lower righthand corner of the screen, there is a very, very small button that’s labeled “TURBO”. Click it, and –

Okay, I’m making that up. I wish I had some kind of cool answer like that, but unfortunately there’s no simple response to that question. There are too many variables to consider, like when you’re experiencing the issue (I assume you mean that the browser is running too slow at times?), what else you have going on, etc. You are running 5.5, right? If so, I suggest using the Send Feedback…option to tell us more about this so we can look into it, or email us.

BZ asked a LOT of questions, JEEZ. I’ll answer two of them for now: When is OmniFocus coming out and who do I have to kill to be on the beta?

To be 100% honest, we don’t know when OmniFocus is coming out. There is a team working full time on developing this product, but it’s just too early to make predictions. We all really want to get it in your hands as soon as possible, though. As for the beta, when the time comes we’ll be asking for volunteers. If you want to get your name in the hat now, subscribe to this list and we’ll get in touch with you as soon as it’s Beta Time (like Hammer Time, except with slimmer pants).

Stack said, Tell us a little bit about OmniFocus. [...] The GTD system gives you breathing room to be implemented in a few different ways, but aside from interface stuff I don’t really see how your product can distinguish itself from its competitors in the market. How will OmniFocus be different?

I can’t make any commitments yet on specific features that will be included in OmniFocus (I know, I’m all “ask us anything!” and then I give you, “errr…except that”). We’re still defining how features will work; figuring out implementation and UI, and creating crazy mockups using OmniGraffle (oh, OmniGraffle, is there anything you can’t do?).

I will say that the “interface stuff” – how the software looks, the way that it works, the experience you have when using it – is exactly what can distinguish one app from another and make all the difference in its value. If OmniFocus ends up being a joy to use, if it seamlessly integrates into your workflow, if it stays out of your way but provides you with what you need, then we’ll have accomplished some of our biggest goals.

Our friend Corentin (who has done countless French localizations for us, merci!) asks, in part, What’s planned for OmniWeb 5.6? When will a beta be out the door?

We are planning for 5.6 to be a WebKit update. As for timing, we have to get through 5.5.1 (currently in beta), then 5.5.2, then revisit the WebKit situation so…in short, we’re not sure when 5.6 will be available, but it shouldn’t be too long of a wait. *knock wood*

Daniel says, I’m playing through Oni at the moment, and I’ve found a few bugs. If I report them, do they have a chance of ever being fixed?

Well…probably not. That’s what I’m told, anyway. We did the game port many, many moons ago and no longer have anything to do with Oni, which is now owned by Take 2 Interactive. You could contact them with your bug info and request an update, but it doesn’t sound very likely that it will happen. Sorry, I wish I had a more helpful answer.

WHEW. That’s all for now, folks, I’ll try and answer more tomorrow. Oh, and for the record, we have one cat. Her name is Lotus. She’s kind of mangy and makes horrible yowling sounds, but she is loved nonetheless.