A week and a half ago, I announced that we were planning to bring all five of our productivity apps to iPad.  So much has happened in the short period of time since then that it feels like we’ve been in some sort of time distortion field!

Let me skip straight to the good stuff and share some screenshots with you:

I should point out that the document icons in the document lists come from the QuickLook previews generated on the Mac, so they show features that aren’t actually supported in the iPad app yet:  for example, if you compare the OmniGraffle canvas screenshot with the corresponding icon in its document list, you’ll see that OmniGraffle for iPad doesn’t actually render text yet.

We don’t even have a mechanism for creating new documents yet:  both apps are just loading documents created on a Mac.  But it’s certainly progress!

Now, I mentioned two weeks ago that we were generally prioritizing iPad work over some of our Mac projects, but that some Mac projects—specifically, OmniOutliner 4 and OmniPlan 2—would take precedence over their iPad counterparts.  In response to that plan, I received a lot of feedback that folks would like to see OmniOutliner for iPad sooner rather than later.

So we started thinking about how we could get started on OmniOutliner for iPad sooner.  We really don’t want to delay OmniOutliner 4, so we instead started thinking about how we could finish OmniOutliner 4 more quickly.  We realized that if we scaled back some of the esoteric features which we’d planned for the Pro edition of version 4—cloning and multiple schemas—we could shave three months off its development schedule and get started on OmniOutliner for iPad that much sooner.  Now, both of those features are still pretty interesting to us, and we’ve already laid the groundwork for supporting these in the underlying outlining engine—but we think bringing OmniOutliner on iPad is more important overall, so that’s what we’re going to do.

So I’m pleased to say that both OmniOutliner 4 and OmniOutliner for iPad will be coming three months sooner!

Oh, what’s coming in OmniOutliner 4?  We’ve rebuilt the engine inside of OmniOutliner, so among other things it will support text zooming, showing and hiding columns, “Smart Match” completion cells, searching across all column types, better link handling (no more unfindable tokens!), and (in the Pro edition) saved smart folders.  (Also, say goodbye to the old Aqua drawer!)

Thanks for all your feedback on my last announcement, and I look forward to receiving any feedback you might have on this update!

One of the things we often struggle with as a company is deciding how much to talk about our future plans and our current work towards those plans.  Our natural inclination is to be open about what we’re doing, but there are several problems with talking about future plans:

• Our plans can and will change, upsetting customers who were making their own plans based on our original plan.
• Our plans might interfere with current sales, as customers stop buying OmniGraffle 8 in anticipation of the future release of OmniGraffle 9.
• We might get accused of promoting vaporware, as when we started talking about OmniFocus.

But there are also problems with not talking about our future plans, as it leaves people wondering what direction we’re going and whether they’d like to be going that direction too.  So, given the exciting event of this week, I think it’s appropriate for us to share some of our plans with you now…

Remember how Macintosh was intended to be the computer “for the rest of us“?  That’s what we feel Apple’s iPad is:  the best computing device for most of the things people use computers for.  (Or, as Apple puts it, “the best way to experience the web, email, and photos.”)  It’s the computer people can sit down and start using immediately, without training, whether they’re 2 or 92.

We’re really excited about Apple’s iPad, and we want to make all of our products available for it as soon as we can.  Yes, we already had a big year planned for 2010, with several long-anticipated major product releases—but we think iPad is really important:  important enough to spend some time juggling our plans to figure out how we can introduce five new iPad apps.

Yes.  Five.  We want to bring all five of our productivity apps to iPad:  OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, OmniPlan, OmniFocus, and OmniGraphSketcher.

This is a big undertaking, and we can’t do it all at once.  We started working on iPad adaptations of OmniGraffle and OmniFocus as soon as the SDK was made available Wednesday afternoon, and we’re hoping to get started with OmniGraphSketcher for iPad within the next few weeks.

OmniPlan for iPad will be a little further behind, simply because the OmniPlan development team is on the home stretch of their two-year OmniPlan 2 development cycle, and we’d like to get that out the door before bringing OmniPlan to another platform.

Similarly, the OmniOutliner team is also heavily into a major development cycle—one which affects not only the next major release of OmniOutliner, version 4, but also the upcoming major releases of both OmniFocus and OmniPlan—so that team is booked up for at least the next several months.  But while it won’t be on iPad on day one, OmniOutliner is where all of our projects start and we think it will be a great fit for iPad, so we plan to adapt it as soon as possible.

What does this mean for our non-iPad apps?  Well, for the apps we’re bringing to iPad immediately there will be a bit of a delay in their next major Mac release cycle:  for example, while we’ve already done a fair bit of work on OmniGraffle 6 for Mac, we’re going to put that work on hold while we work on the iPad adaptation.  Not that we don’t think OmniGraffle 6 is important or exciting, but we think OmniGraffle for iPad is even more important.  For the other apps, OmniPlan 2 and OmniOutliner 4, we’re hoping for little or no delay in our upcoming releases, but there’s likely to be a bit of a pause immediately afterwards as the teams shift gears and start working on bringing those apps to iPad as well.

So, that’s our current plan.  As I said in my introduction, our plans do change over time—obviously, they’ve changed quite a bit just this week!—so please don’t rely on things happening according to today’s particular snapshot of those plans.  But I hope that this snapshot at least gives you a sense of what we’re doing and why (and perhaps even an idea of when), so you can decide whether we’re going in a direction you’re interested in.  Either way, I hope you’ll let us know!

Thanks for your time!

The first Omni release of 2010! No new features here, but if you used OmniOutliner in Chinese you probably noticed that it was showing up in another language! Sorry about that, the Chinese localization was missing in the 3.9.4 release but it’s back now! You can download this version from our site or using the software updater.

If you encounter any problems or have a question, please contact us at omnioutliner@omnigroup.com or by using the Help -> Send Feedback option in the app. Thanks!

OmniOutliner 3.9.4 is now available which fixes a compatibility issue a few Automator actions had. It also contains localized versions of the updated help file from version 3.9.3 as well as a couple export bug fixes.

Thank you everyone who helped test the 3.9.4 betas to make sure the new build process didn’t introduce any bugs, we appreciate the help!

When you’re ready, you can grab this version through OmniOutliner’s software updater or from our site where you will also find the full release notes. And as always, if you have any questions or run into trouble, please email us at omnioutliner@omnigroup.com or use the Help -> Send Feedback option in the app.

This morning we released the final version of OmniGraphSketcher 1.1 via our website and software update. No matter how you use the app, we think you’ll notice the improvements:

• If you do data plots, we have a new error bars feature, better auto-scaling, a more flexible data importer (we can now deal with semicolons, pipes, and more currency symbols), and better ability to incrementally add data to an existing data series.
• If you do economics / line graphs, we’ve improved line snapping, made axis titles draggable, and improved speed by implementing option-drag to copy graph elements.
• If you do math graphs, the canvas now snaps to square grid while resizing, and we’ve added better support for 1-dimensional number lines. We’ve also improved equations for best-fit lines.
• For everyone, we have LinkBack to help with graphs embedded in other documents,  an awesome tracing feature that makes it easier to bring in information not represented by numbers, and lots of other interface improvements and bug fixes.

We’re really happy with this release and we hope you will be too – please don’t hesitate to email us or use the Send Feedback item in the OmniGraphSketcher Help menu.

OmniGraphSketcher 1.1 Beta 3 is now available via the website and software update. This update features fixes for two crashes, as well as an improvement to horizontal line-snapping. We’re eager to hear from users about any problems they may be having with the betas, as we’re quickly nearing a 1.1 final release. Please don’t hesitate to Help > Send Feedback or email.

Just in time for the upcoming holiday weekend in the U.S., here’s the latest OmniGraphSketcher beta! This release is mostly bugfixes and tweaks, so check out the release notes and grab it from our download page or via software update if you’re already running beta 1.

Feedback on our new error bars feature has been great, but we’d like to hear from as many of you as possible before this release goes final (that goes for all of the new features). Please don’t hesitate to email or Help > Send Feedback from within OmniGraphSketcher.

The last of the troubling little issues when running in Mac OS X 10.6 have been addressed and passed muster, so it’s time for this release to go final.

Please do go see all about it at the historical release notes page, and the beta page is closed for the meantime, the download page is the place to be.

Today we’re happy to announce the public beta of OmniGraphSketcher 1.1. You can grab it via the beta download page.

So what’s new? A lot! We had a great response to OmniGraphSketcher 1.0 and have been working hard on UI tweaks to make the graphing experience even better, as well as a few frequently requested features:

• Error Bars: We’ve been hinting at this for a while, but OmniGraphSketcher can now detect parallel data series and automatically convert them into error bars, as well as create error bars with user-specified offsets.
• Support For LinkBack: Now when you “Copy as Image” and paste your graph into OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner or any other Linkback-compliant application, you can double-click the pasted image to edit it directly in OmniGraphSketcher. Saving your changes in OmniGraphSketcher will update the linked graph image.
• Tracing: The OmniGraphSketcher canvas can now be made transparent, allowing you to position the graph window over an existing document and transfer data simply by drawing.

What about those UI tweaks? We’ve adjusted many tool behaviors for consistency within the application, as well as across our product range. Option-drag now duplicates graph objects, the tab key cycles through labels, and snapping works better in all tools (and when you’re trying to snap both to an object and to vertical/horizontal). It’s also much easier to add a new point to an existing series: just select a line and one or more free-floating points, then click one of the line-type buttons on the style inspector.

There’s a ton more stuff listed in the beta release notes, so you’ll have something to read while your download finishes. We look forward to your feedback!