If coding were furniture making, we’d have heard the sounds of intense hammering, sawing, planing, the tap tap tap of the chisel, and, I suspect, occasional splintering and smashing of prototypes from Tim’s office over the past few months. Sawdust would have piled high to the rafters and we would have stood outside the craftsman’s door, waiting for the masterpiece to emerge.

In reality of course we heard mostly the gentle sounds of typing, muffled wails and occasional high volume electronica beats early in the morning, but masterpiece is the right word for the result.

Here’s a shot of the prefs pane from the alpha build of OmniFocus that is, right now, this very minute, running on my desktop. I can now leave my laptop at home and have all my data sync up using not one, not two, but three different sync options.

Click the image below to view LIFE SIZE.

Still internal alpha for now, but we’re planning on having this in the public sneaky peek before the release of Duke Nukem Forever or whenever Ken gets tired of waiting for it to be done.

Hey, friends. What is it that is up? We’ve just finished a new video about Perspectives over here. If you’d like to check it out, you can find it here.

If you’d like to check it out later, it can be found under ‘Resources’ on the OmniFocus page.

We’ve got a few more lined up and we’ll be getting those out ASAP but if there’s anything in particular you’d like to see for the future, please feel free to drop us a line or leave a note in the comments.

Hope you enjoy!

Good news, everyone! As the cryptic title suggests, OmniFocus 1.0.1 is now available. Here’s a list of the haps:

• Stability
  • Updated our error handling support to catch more cases where there is a possible problem and promote it to a crash, so that we can then fix it. Since OmniFocus always keeps its data in a saved state, the net effect of this is that any such exception won’t be able to cause data corruption.
  • Copy a workaround for a bug in Mac OS X 10.5 that can cause a crash when using the keyboard to navigate between cells in the outline.
  • Fixed exception where committing editing on a row caused that row to be collated into a different group.
  • Fixed a few glitches in the AppleScript suite that could cause scripting errors.
  • Fixed exceptions when parsing some European date formats. Updated the date parsing to log details about the date format if there is a problem parsing a date, allowing the user to more easily gather the relevant information in the future.
  • Fixed an occasional hang when performing a manual check for updates when no updates are available.
  • Clicking on a link to a recently deleted task will no longer cause an error.
  • We now ignore and log exceptions raised from Growl.
  • Fixed bug causing the available/due soon/overdue timer to fire too often in some cases.
  • iCal syncing will now deal with unnamed calendars.
• Interface
  • The Perspectives menu now always has options to make a new perspective or save a snapshot of the current view settings into the current perspective.
  • The Clear Perspective command has been folded into the Revert to Default View command, so you don’t have to take two steps to get back to normal.
  • Actions created in context mode should no longer appear to be missing their project, once it is assigned.
  • Updated usage of shadows in the interface to match changes made in Mac OS X 10.5.
  • Empty projects with a start date will now get the normal project icon once its start date passes instead of getting stuck with the ‘pending’ badge.
  • The flag icon should now show up appropriately in HTML exports.
• Miscellaneous
  • Various small updates to the online help.
  • Turned off some debug logging in the Clip-o-Tron 3000.
  • Software Update will now only show you builds on the same track that you are running. So, if you want to see sneakypeek builds, you’ll need to manually download one sneakypeek build from the main OmniFocus site.
• Internationalization
  • Fixed several issues that would prevent internationalization. No localizations are in place, but those are in progress for a future release.

And, as always, work continues. Thanks to all of those who helped out during the SneakyPeek!

A few hours ago, Apple announced the iPhone SDK! We’re still trying to download it (Apple’s servers are overloaded), but it looks like it has all the features we were hoping for.

We’re eager to get started on our first iPhone app—and, yes, that first app will be… OmniFocus.

(Now to find out just exactly what we’ll be able to do!)

I actually posted this to our website last week, but forgot to post this on the blog. Go me!We’ve had a tremendous response to OmniFocus, and despite bringing on two support ninjas over the last year to help out with it, we’re still struggling. Frankly, that sucks. Solution: more hiring!Visit our jobs page for more information.

Exciting news! OmniFocus has won a Best in Show award at the Macworld Expo this year. Oh man, I LOVE Best in Show. You know, “Now tell me, which one of these dogs would you want to have as your wide receiver on your football team?” — seriously, such a great movie.

Er, wait. Wrong Best in Show. This is the annual Macworld feature presentation that honors those products that have pushed the boundaries of innovation, quality, and overall creativity. Well, that’s even cooler than a mockumentary about dog shows. Here’s what the good people at Macworld wrote about OmniFocus:

“Plenty of Mac programs will help you manage your to-do list (including a few that are built right into OS X), but OmniFocus ($80) is one of the nicest ones we’ve seen. Like many of these to-do apps, it’s optimized for the Getting Things Done task-management system: That means Omnifocus makes it easy to capture new to-do items anytime one occurs to you, and it lets you assign to-do items to both projects and contexts (the latter being GTD-speak for where or how you’ll accomplish the job). Omnifocus also integrates nicely with OS X: it’ll sync with iCal, you can add tasks via e-mail, and you can search your to-do list with Spotlight. You can view your upcoming tasks from multiple perspectives—by project, context, as part of a project-planning outline—yet the interface is nice and clean.”

Wow, right? BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE. Not only that, but it seems OmniFocus also received an Editor’s Choice award from The Mac Observer. TMO’s first Editor’s Choice Awards include 12 products that they feel represent the best of the best of the products being shown at Macworld, and we’re thrilled to be included on their list. They wrote:

“As with seemingly all of The Omni Group’s products, the company has developed a very Mac-oriented solution with OmniFocus that works very well, is easy to use, and is a cut above competing products.”

Congratulations to the other Awards winners, and a huge thank you to Macworld and The Mac Observer for the honors!

After many months of development and countless blog posts providing you with murky updates on our progress, what else is left to say . . . except SWEET FAT HOT HAM, OmniFocus 1.0 is here!

Yes, OmniFocus has finally shed its beta-ness and it’s all ready for prime time. Uh, we hope. I mean, ha ha, we’re pretty sure it won’t eat your hard drive or anything! We totally fixed THAT bug.

To those who boldly test-drove OmniFocus throughout the beta process, we owe you a huge thanks for all your helpful feedback. Thanks, too, to those of you who sent us feature requests and ideas for how to make OmniFocus the best darned OmniFocus it could be.

It’s just going to get better from here: we have big plans for OmniFocus 1.1 - 2.0 in the works. In the meantime, though, we’re pretty pleased with how 1.0 has turned out, and we sure hope you like it too.

On licensing:

OmniFocus is now selling for $79.95. OmniOutliner Professional license owners are currently eligible for a 25% discount off the OmniFocus license fee. Quantity discounts, educational, and family pricing are available at our online store.

You can download OmniFocus and use it in unlicensed mode (with no feature restrictions) for 14 days.

Other useful stuff:

• Watch the 15-minute OmniFocus Quick Start Video (180MB, 50MB iPhone version here)
• View our “At-a-Glance” handy-dandy Reference Chart

One more thing:

If you’re going to be at Macworld next week, please come by our booth (#602) and say howdy! We’d love to meet you in person and answer any questions you might have. Well, unless they’re along the lines of, “Why do you guys have such a lame blog?”, of course.

Got another question from a customer which I thought other folks might be interested in, so up on the blog it goes!

Q: Has there been any progress on index card printing? I’ve been checking through the New Features lists with each releases, but I haven’t seen anything relevant. Have I missed something? It would be really great if I could print to index cards nicely.

A: You can do this, but it’s not something that we mentioned in the feature list. What you want to do is set up a custom paper size, then tell OmniFocus to use that paper size when printing.

(This assumes your printer supports printing to 3×5 cards, of course.)

To set up a custom paper size, do the following:

1. Open OmniFocus
2. Select File -> Page Setup
3. In the Paper Size pop-up menu, select “Manage Custom Sizes”.
4. In the window that appears, press the plus-sign button in the lower left.
5. Double-click the new item that appears in the left column, and rename it to “3×5 Notecard”.
6. On the right side of the page, set the page width to 5 inches, and the page height to 3 inches.
7. Adjust the printer margins to taste, or leave them on the default values.
8. Press the Okay button to close the window and save your custom paper size.

You’ll now be taken back to the page setup sheet in OmniFocus. Again, assuming your printer supports printing to 3×5 cards, you can now select your custom paper size in the “Paper Size” pop-up. Press the Okay button.

Do a test print (or preview), adjust to taste, and you’re all set to take your OmniFocus info with you all pocket-sized.

Last week, your humble support ninja got this in an email from a customer:

It would be nice to select which tasks/projects I want to have printed out and get some more information on my piece of paper (e.g. dates).

This is pretty easy to do, and I figured other folks might want to do this as well, so up on the blog it goes!

OmniFocus has a feature called “Perspectives” which allows you to set up different views of your information that you’d like to access quickly and easily. For example, I have one perspective saved that focuses on my Support Ninja tasks and another that shows all my completed actions, which flip over to during those “when did i do that task again?” moments I occasionally have.

More importantly, I also have a “To-Go” perspective that shows the contexts for going out and running errands, but not the ones like ‘desk’, ‘office’, or ‘home’. Whenever I need a new task list, I just switch to that perspective, print my task list, and off I go.

To set this up, do the following:

Switch to context view, then set the window up as you’d like your to-go task list to look. Command-click the relevant contexts to select them, change up the view bar settings, and so forth. Get everything looking how you’d like it to look on paper.

Next, select Perspectives -> Show Perspectives Window from the menu bar. Press the “Plus” button in the lower left. Name the new perspective “To-Go”, or “Printed Task List”, or whatever you’d like.

When you set the perspective up, we add an item for it under the Perspectives menu. From now on, anytime you want to print your task list, just select that menu item and print. We’ll apply the settings you specified for you, saving you the effort of twiddling everything yourself.

Pro tip: if the Perspectives window is showing on screen, you can just select the perspective in the window, then hit the quick print button at the bottom. We’ll print your list without switching your window to that perspective.

And if you ever want to change how the printout looks, just activate the perspective, adjust how the window is set up, and press the button with the camera icon. We’ll save the new settings into your perspective for you.

(One neat trick I used this for - to use less paper, use File -> Page Setup to set the scale to something less than 100%, so you get more tasks on less paper. We’ll save that setting into the perspective, too.)

Enjoy!

I just wanted to write a quick note to thank you all for your support! In less than five days, we’ve already received over $100,000 in preorders for OmniFocus, making this one of our strongest product launches of all time.

We’re still hard at work (as you can see if you’ve been following along with the multiple beta updates we’re pushing out each day)–but it’s inspiring to see that the time and resources our team has invested into this over the last 16 months has earned your vote of confidence.

Thank you!