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!

OmniOutliner 3.9 is now available as a free update for all OmniOutliner 3 customers! Thanks to everyone who helped beta test, we appreciate it!

This release brings some much needed updating in the form of our self-installing updater and switching to Apple’s auto-save feature. Any file you have open will now be backed-up even if you’ve never saved it!

The other big addition in 3.9 is a new exporter for OmniOutliner Professional. You will now find a “Word 2007 Format (docx)” in the list which exports to Microsofts new Office Open XML format. The docx format can also be imported to Pages ‘09 and some other apps. This export will retain your level styles and also retain the outline structure for viewing in Word’s outline mode. More details about what is supported and its limitations are available in the release notes.

If you’re already using OmniOutliner 3, version 3.9 is a free update. If you haven’t tried out OmniOutliner yet, version 3.9 has switched over to using a 2-week fully functional trial instead of trial licenses, so give it a go! There’s also a number of smaller additions and bug fixes in this release. Please see the release notes for full details. Head on over to the download page when you’re ready, or use the built-in updater if you’re using a 3.9 beta (OmniOutliner menu -> Check for Updates). If you have any feedback on this release, please let us know by using the Send Feedback option under the help menu or send an email to omnioutliner@omnigroup.com. Thanks!

Beta 6 of OmniOutliner 3.9 is ready for use! With the OS requirement change to 10.4, we realized we could now implement one more feature we’ve been wanting to do for a while. OmniOutliner will now use Apple’s auto-save feature for backups instead of our own version. This is the same thing our other apps use already like OmniPlan and OmniGraffle. The one major feature this gets us is that new never before saved files will now be backed up incase you encounter a crash. Those files will be saved to “~/Library/Autosave Information”. Backups of previously saved files will be located in the same folder that contains the OmniOutliner document. More details are available in the release notes.

Beta 6 also fixes a couple bugs, and a couple crashes that existed in the previous 3.9 betas.

Please see the release notes for full details. Head on over to the download page when you’re ready, or use the built-in updater if you’re using a 3.9 beta (OmniOutliner menu -> Check for Updates). If you have any feedback on this release, please let us know by using the Send Feedback option under the help menu or send an email to omnioutliner@omnigroup.com. Thanks!

Turns out we accidentally broke the Quick Look generator in beta 4 when it’s used from app, which all of you should be doing. This unfortunately slipped passed us due to the fun involved in testing the Quick Look generator when there’s a million different versions of the app available. So just a day later, beta 5 is now available with working Quick Look support! There’s also a cool new feature to it that was actually in beta 4. If you mouse over the bottom center of the Quick Look preview, two buttons will appear for expand and collapse all. Hurray for software updater!

Please see the release notes for full details. Head on over to the download page when you’re ready, or use the built-in updater if you’re using a 3.9 beta (OmniOutliner menu -> Check for Updates). If you have any feedback on this release, please let us know by using the Send Feedback option under the help menu or send an email to omnioutliner@omnigroup.com. Thanks!

Sorry for all the confusion with the beta 3 expiration warning. Beta 4 is now available for download. Nothing major in this release as we’re approaching the final version. We did fix a crash that would occur when saving under certain conditions. Unfortunately there is still a crash that can happen when you expand a PDF attachment after saving. This crash is very finicky so we’ve haven’t been able to track down the exact cause yet. We also fixed a couple bugs that were introduced in the last beta.

Please see the release notes for full details. Head on over to the download page when you’re ready, or use the built-in updater if you’re using beta 3 (OmniOutliner menu -> Check for Updates). If you have any feedback on this release, please let us know by using the Send Feedback option under the help menu or send an email to omnioutliner@omnigroup.com. Thanks!

OmniOutliner 3.9 beta 3 is now available! There’s a lot of small fixes and features in this release. Most notably, the issues with AppleScripts on the toolbar should be fully fixed now and alternate row color is now supported in DHTML and Quick Look. There’s also been more work on the docx export. InDesign and OpenOffice should no longer crash when trying to import the docx files. Please read the release notes for full details.

The issue with the software updater leaving the old version behind when not asked for should be resolved as well. You will still see this issue when updating to beta 3 though since the fix won’t take effect until you’re updating from beta 3.

As always, please let us know if you run into any problems by using the Send Feedback option under the Help menu in the app or by sending an email to omnioutliner@omnigroup.com. If you’re ready to give it a go, head over to the download page or use the updater in the app!

OmniOutliner 3.9 beta 2 is now available which fixes a handful of crashes introduced in beta 1. It also has a few improvements to the docx exporter such as retaining line breaks in row and note text and supporting PDFs. Also, when importing the docx files into Pages, attachments with spaces in the name will work, this includes LinkBack objects from OmniGraffle. This has not been addressed for MS Word yet but is something we’ll be trying to for beta 3.

One other fix in this beta is for Dvorak users. We were finally able to solve the issue that prevented the ‘Add Child’ and ‘Add Aunt’ keyboard shortcut from working.

Please see the release notes for full details of the beta. And if you’re using beta 1, remember you can now update through the app, just select the Check for Updates option under the OmniOutliner menu! Otherwise you can always download it from our website. If you have any feedback on this beta, please let us know by choosing Send Feedback from the Help menu or by sending an email to omnioutliner@omnigroup.com. Thanks!

OmniOutliner v3.9 beta 1 has arrived! It should be noted that OmniOutliner v3.9 and later will now require OS X v10.4.8 Tiger or later. We’ll get to the reason for that in a bit.

One complaint we often hear from users is that they can’t move their data out nicely into another app when they’ve finished their outlining stage. MS Word and Pages are often the apps they want to move to. Well we hopefully have a good solution for you. OmniOutliner Pro users will now have a new export format “Word 2007 Format (docx)” they can use. This exports to the OOXML format used in MS Word 2008 (Mac) and MS Word 2007 (Windows). As an added bonus, Pages ‘09 can import this format. Both Pages and Word have outline view modes now which will show you your document in a similar fashion to what you see in OO. In other view modes, you will see your document in a flat form. Your row level styles will be carried over into header styles as well, allowing for easy style modification. This can also be used as a way to share your OO documents with Windows users that also allows editing. OmniOutliner can not import the docx format however. For more in-depth details of the export format, please see the release notes.

Another new feature we’ve added is a new pasteboard type to work with our latest application, OmniGraphSketcher! If you have data in an OmniOutliner file you want to graph, you can simply copy and paste it into OGS regardless if you have checkboxes or handles showing.

So why the new OS requirement? Well we thought it was time to include the new software updater that our other apps have been using for a while now. Unfortunately, it doesn’t run on 10.3.9. According to the software update statistics we have, it looks like a reasonable time to make this change. Hopefully those statistics are accurate!

This update is free to all licensed OmniOutliner 3 users. Like always, if you run into any problems or have any feedback, please contact our Support Ninjas by using the Help -> Send Feedback option or email them at omnioutliner@omnigroup.com. If you’re ready to give the beta a try, go and download it!

OmniOutliner 3.8 is now available! New features in this version are:

- Quick Look support for attachments
As can be done in OmniFocus already, you can now bring up the Quick Look preview of files you’ve attached or linked into OmniOutliner documents. This is very handy for file types that can’t be rendered in OmniOutliner, or if you want to bring up the data in the file to easily view side-by-side with your outline. To bring up the Quick Look preview, just select the attachment and push the space bar. There’s also an option in the contextual menu for attachments.

- Updated Keynote import support
You can now import Keynote files created in any currently existing versions of Keynote (that would be up to Keynote ‘09) and in the native .key format! However, what’s actually imported has not changed much from the preview Keynote importing capabilities.

There’s also been a couple more improvements to the HTML exporters and some other fixes. You can read the full release notes here.

This is a free update to all OmniOutliner 3.x licensed users. And as always, please contact our Support Ninjas if you encounter any issues or have any questions by using the Send Feedback option under the Help menu of the app.

Go and download it!

OmniOutliner 3.8 beta 2 is now available with a couple new additions! The Keynote importing support has been updated to work with all existing versions of Keynote. What is actually imported has not changed much at all but you no longer need to save to another format to import it if you were before. The HTML exporters has also been updated to support the indent children value so if you like to make your file flat even though it makes use of different row levels, you can now export and have it look the same way.

As always if you encounter any problems, please contact our Support Ninjas by using the Send Feedback option under the app’s Help menu or send an email to omnioutliner@omnigroup.com. Full release notes are available here. Go download it now!