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!

BIG NEWS OVER HERE PEOPLE. After over 500 sneaky peek releases, which so many of you have been kind enough to give us feedback on, we are finally drawing the OmniFocus early release cycle to a close, with a bright and shiny final release date in mind: January 8, 2008.

As Ken wrote in his message to the OmniFocus mailing list, “We could probably go on indefinitely in this state: you continue to give us lots of great ideas for ways in which we could improve the software further, and it’s hard to resist implementing a good idea when we hear it.”

For REAL. This whole process has taken a lot longer than we had initially guessed, partially because of all the amazing feedback we received along the way. Oh, the spirited conversations that OmniFocus has sparked as we’ve tweaked the way the application works, and that’s just here in the office. I won’t get into details, but take it from me: you do not want to use the term “bucket” around here for a while—lest you trigger a frothy-mouthed debate, liberal use of the Caps Lock key, and eventual frantic emailing back-and-forth of walrus images.

Anyway, we’ve decided not only to commit to a final ship date, but also offer you a special deal. From today until January 8, you can pre-purchase OmniFocus at its introductory rate of $39.95. Once the final version ships, OmniFocus will sell for $79.95—so buy now, and save 50%.

But Omni, you might be thinking. What will I actually get if I buy it now? This sounds like one of those BS marketing schemes where if I buy in the next hour I’ll also get a set of steak knives.

Ha ha! Come on, you know us better than that! We would never give you steak knives, because then you might use them to stab us.

If you buy now, you’ll get a license that will work in the final version of the software. We’ll send you an email when the final version ships, so you’ll know exactly when it becomes available.

In the meantime, you can continue to use the beta version, which we’re opening up to the general public today. While the betas will still be expiring (so you’re encouraged to download more recent versions and not be stuck with bugs we may have fixed), you can easily set your OmniFocus preferences to automatically grab the most recent builds.

Also, if you are an OmniOutliner Professional license owner, you get an additional 25% discount on top of the current introductory pricing. Quantity discounts, educational, and family pricing are all available on our online store.

Thank you for helping us make OmniFocus such a great piece of software, and thank you for your patience during our development cycle.

And now, the relevant links:

• Learn more about OmniFocus and download the beta
• Updated OmniFocus video overview (15 min.) High-Definition (180MB) iPhone (50MB)
• Pre-order Omnifocus in our online store

Linda asked lil’ ol’ me to provide the second post in our ongoing OmniFocus: What We’ve Learned So Far series. Whether she will come to regret this, only time can tell. Without further ado, the post beginneth thusly:Okay, I’m long-winded; sue me. Before I can really tell you how well the OmniFocus test process is going, though, I feel like I have to supply a bit of background on how we’ve handled this process for previous projects. It went a little something like this:

1. Development team produces build of application OmniFoo they’re mostly happy with.
2. Marketing Weasel writes press release, webmaster nee Web Editor updates site with brand-new OmniFoo Beta page. We push new version of website.
3. VersionTracker, etc. pick up on new build.
4. Support Ninjas are crushed under a big pile of electronic mail for the next three months. All that is heard from them is a soft but desperate honking noise. Think baby penguin at the bottom of a deep ice-crevasse.

This has a couple of negative effects: first of all, when you’re buried in raw oscillating electrons up to your neck, it’s really hard on the skin; not at all like that ‘drink from the glowy pool of water’ scene in Tron would have you believe.More seriously: we get plenty of eyeballs on the new application, which is a good thing. Unfortunately we also got all those eyeballs on the new app at the exact same time. So that thing that’s forehead-smackingly obviously broken (which, of course, we failed to catch in the gajillions of hours we spent staring at the app before we pushed it out) gets reported 200 times.Now, the first report of an issue? Good. The tenth? Gold - then we know that this isn’t random gremlin activity; there is something here we need to figure out. This holds up till, oh, somewhere between 30 and 50 reports. Beyond that, it’s a problem we know about, that we know we need to fix, but from there on out the additional utility of the reports drops off fast. The time it takes the Ninjas to process them doesn’t, however.Result: stressed-out ninjas, frustrated engineers (because they’re not getting reports of the problems in the newest builds; we’re still looking at launch day reports), and the folks with the test builds are having to wade through issues that we haven’t fixed because we’re still sorting and writing up reports.In short, it works, but it’s painful for everyone involved. So this time, we did something better. Process this time:

1. A couple months before we’re ready to start testing, let folks know we’ll be ready to start testing in a couple months. Set up an email list to join if they’d like to participate.
2. Produce build of application we’re ready to start testing.
3. Make build available to some of the folks on said list.
4. Fix the problems they find, including forehead-smackers.
5. Return to step 3, above.

Advantages: Many. We get feedback in manageable quantities. Testers get fixes that bear some resemblance to their reports. Support ninjas get fewer ulcers. World shares cola beverage, sings in perfect harmony.What do we need to do differently next time? To begin with, we need to give customers the ability to help us prioritize their mail, by at the very least sorting it into “bug report”, “feature request”, and “oh god, where is my download login” buckets. The other thing? If we choose to implement any more apps based on the current 800-pound gorilla of personal productivity methodologies, I’m just going to start hiring and never, ever stop. ;-)Which, of course, provides me with a perfect opportunity to link point interested parties over to our Want Work? page, newly updated as of yesterday.