I like to think that one of my more valuable contributions as an Omni employee is providing the lowest common denominator factor in usability testing. That is, when an engineer wants to really understand how a total Cro-Magnon will be using their app, they come to me.

Oh yeah, that’s right. Who’s got two thumbs and represents the most pathetic use case? THIS gal.

Anyway, I thought some of you might be interested in seeing how some of our iPad development work is happening for OmniGraphSketcher. Now obviously we do a lot of mockups in what is surely the world’s best program for creating IA/UX designs, OmniGraffle. But when it comes to envisioning how something works on a piece of hardware no one can actually use yet, a lot of people here are going low-tech to try and figure it out.

Omni’s lead developer for OmniGraphSketcher, Robin, created some iPad-sized paper templates for sketching up ideas.

He didn’t stop there, though. No sir, he most certainly did NOT. Here’s his custom graph paper notebook, which he cut to iPad dimensions using a table saw.

I want to say that’s sort of crazy, except our own CEO Ken Case created a terrifyingly accurate faux iPad using a 3D printer. It—well, it even has a little Omni logo on it. And a 30-pin dock connector. And . . . look, it’s just very, very realistic and I’m a little worried about how much sleep everyone is getting, okay?

Here’s Robin’s own iPad-sized hardware prototype (!) with a variety of UI element ideas designed by our User Experience lead, William Van Hecke.

That’s what Robin had me look at the other day, while asking a series of questions. I’m sure he regretted it almost instantly.

Robin: “So let’s say you want to turn this point from a circle into a square. What would you do?”

Me: “Buhhhhh. Dur. I touch it?”

Robin (soothingly): “Okay. You see a little blue circle around the element. Then what do you do?”

Me: “Uhhhhhrrrr. I’d . . . maybe I’d press real hard. Like this.” *smoosh*

Robin: “Um . . . well, okay. You get a dialogue that says ‘copy’.”

Me: “OH GOD NO THAT’S WRONG ISN’T IT MY HEAD MY HEAD MY HEEAAAD.”

Robin (brisk clap): “Okay then! What say we try this again later.”

Lastly, here’s Robin interacting with his fauxPad.

I think he’s making color adjustments. On a fake, printed-out inspector that Bill made. To the document that is actually just a piece of paper. Man, software development is weird.

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!

One of the most common requests we get for OmniGraphSketcher is to support multiple y-scales overlaid on the same graph, to make it possible to plot several different types of related data on the same chart. Some people call this approach “dual y-axes” because graphs of this type tend to put vertical axes on both sides of the graph area. For a while now we’ve been debating whether or not this is a good idea.

We’ve now posted an article with our thoughts on the matter.

Our main conclusion was that overlaying data with disparate scales saves space, but it makes the data significantly harder to interpret. The dual axes “duel” for your attention. So instead of overlaying scales, we recommend using a set of multiple graphs, aligned along their common axis. Graph Sketcher does not have a built-in option for this, but you can easily Copy As Image with each graph and paste into OmniGraffle or another program with layout capabilities.

Read the article for more details, and if you have a graph with overlaid scales that you think is more effective than its separated-and-aligned counterpart, please let us know — we still have an open mind about it.

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.

If you read our tagline, you might think that OmniGraphSketcher is all about “fast, simple graph drawing and data plotting.”

Which is true.

But why did we make such a program? (Or if you like puns, what’s the “point”?) Why does it keep us up at night, and how do we decide which features should be improved first? In short, I want to tell you about our vision.

The first part of the vision has to do with quantitative ideas. Quantitative means that scale is relevant. It means it’s valid to say that one thing is twice as big, far, tall, fast, costly, or experienced as another. Quantitative ideas are central to scientific disciplines and an important part of most business and policy issues. Thinking quantitatively allows us to understand and predict how different parts of the world relate to each other in a precise manner.  How will higher taxes affect the local economy? How will this ratio of chemicals change the battery’s charging time? How does this bridge react to increasingly larger loads?

I emphasize ideas because quantitative knowledge is not limited to what traditional software tools have focused on: numerical data and equations. Sometimes knowledge is less specific. For example, you might just have a rough idea of how different price points affect the number of sales. Or you might know how a new material behaves at room temperature but have only an intuition about what happens above 100 degrees. These quantitative ideas could be a precursor to a more precise theory, or they could be as precise as they need to be, given the messiness of the real world.

The second part of the vision is communicating those ideas visually. That’s because often, the best way to explain a quantitative idea is through a picture. This is true whether you have data, equations, or imprecise quantitative notions. Would you rather have a table with 240 numbers, or a visual plot of that data?

Is it more meaningful to specify f(x) = sine(x), or to see that function in the x-y plane?

And finally, is it more informative to talk generally about the relationship between quantity and price of a product, or to see an illustration of how the price affects the quantity demanded?

Of course, words, equations, and tables of numbers are useful too. But particularly when you’re trying to communicate ideas to someone else, there’s a good chance that a visual will make it easier to understand.

Communication does not just mean throwing information at someone; it means transferring real understanding in a reasonably short amount of time. For this to happen, the receiver needs to get the information on a logistical level — say, a piece of paper or an emailed PDF. Then they need to get it on a perceptual level — for example, notice that one data point is above another or that two data series intersect in a certain place. And finally, they need to translate those visual inputs into something meaningful — say, that the market share of one product is overtaking another.

For successful communication to happen, all three of these levels must be met. To facilitate the logistics, we try to provide easy ways to export and share your graphs. To improve accuracy in perception, we use our knowledge of the human visual system to define and encourage best practices for information layout. And to help make the visuals meaningful, we made it easy for you to annotate your diagrams in a variety of ways.

In summary, the vision of OmniGraphSketcher is to make it as easy as possible to visually communicate your quantitative ideas.

Hopefully, this gives you some hints about how we might expand the functionality of OGS in the future (though we can’t make any guarantees). For example, logarithmic scales and date/time scales are high on our priority list since many quantitative ideas are best expressed in those contexts. We’d also love to improve your ability to annotate graphs by allowing equations or other pictures to be dragged onto the canvas. (For now, you can only do this by exporting your graph to another program.)

This should also provide hints about where we’re not headed. For example, although pie charts are considered standard in some applications, they use a large amount of space, display a small amount of data, and are not well suited to the human visual system. In other words, we don’t think they have any visual communication advantages over bar charts, which we already include (more on this in a future post). Another “standard” feature that we omit on purpose is the legend-in-a-box. It’s much easier to read a graph that puts each label right next to the data it refers to, and we designed OGS to make this easy.

As always, we look forward to your feedback. We’re most interested in the motivations behind requests — for example, “labeling lines” rather than “rotating text”.  And when possible, attach an example graph or diagram — since we so love visual communication.

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!

Lots of news today, people, so I’m going to try and keep this short so you can skip straight ahead to the part where you sit back and bask in that new-software smell.

Updated: OmniFocus! OmniFocus 1.7 is now available for your downloading pleasure, and includes a bevy of interface improvements designed to make everything just a little more smooth and simple. We also re-worked Perspectives, hopefully making the process of working with them much easier. Overall sync performance has been improved (yay!), and you can now view a list of the attachments in your OmniFocus document, and delete them as necessary to speed up document syncing even more.

Also updated: OmniGraffle! OmniGraffle 5.2 includes support for support for portables with Multi-Touch trackpads, so you can now pinch to zoom in or out, resize a selection, or rotate a selection. We also added fixes to tables, shared layers, and dealt with some stability issues.

Also also updated: EVERYTHING ELSE. OmniFocus, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, OmniWeb, OmniPlan—hold on, typing cramp . . . okay—OmniGraphSketcher, OmniDiskSweeper and OmniDazzle have all been updated with support for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

You do not EVEN want to know what time the engineers went to bed last night, is what I’m saying.

Everything can be downloaded from our handy-dandy Snow Leopard status page. Enjoy!