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!

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!

The other day I heard one of my coworkers mention OmniPlan’s gibberish-izer, and while it gave me pause I figured they were referring to some code-related whatchamadingie and calling attention to the fact that I was out of the vernacular loop would only serve to underscore the misperception that marketing weasels are kind of mouth-breathy when it comes to technical stuff.

(I mean, clearly this isn’t true—just look how masterfully I threw out the term “whatchamadingie” just now! Surely that makes up for my ongoing failure to make any sense of words such as “grep”, “sudo”, and that embarrassing misunderstanding regarding “zombies”.)

As it turns out, though, there is in fact an actual gibberish-izer built into both OmniPlan and OmniGraffle. It probably has a real feature name and everything, but since no one bothered to ask ME what to name it (hello, MUMBO-JUMBOTRON! Could there be a better name? Don’t step too close, now, or you’ll get my sheer unrelenting genius all over you, and that stuff will stain), I’ll just tell you that it’s a clever bit of functionality that garbles the data in the documents you send us.

If you choose “Send Feedback” from the Help menu in OmniPlan, you’ll get an option to include a copy of your document with your email. If you’d like to gibberish-ize it, OmniPlan will replace all your tasks, resources, and notes with random boring names like “Task 17″ and “Resource 5″. This way, we can take a look at the structure of your document and help you figure out any problems you might be having, but all your confidential information is protected.

CONFIDENTIAL HIGH-RISK INFO! OMG!

UNEXCITING SANITIZED INFO. WHEW.

With OmniGraffle, we give you the option to convert all text to gibberish (text is actually replaced with little x’s, like dead fish eyeballs!). So, whatever your nefarious plans and diagrams may be, you can always email them to us . . . without, you know, sharing everything with us.

The More You Know™!

Hey OmniPlan planners, 1.6.3 rc 2 has been released!

In this version we fixed a bug where some fonts would lay out with different line heights when editing than when not. We’ve also fixed our crash catching and reporting framework under Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

Please keep in mind that this version is still in development so feedback is encouraged and we apologize if it breaks your computer, corrupts your files, or ruins your weekend.

As always, please let us know if you have any questions or comments. You can contact us directly via our support page or by using the Send Feedback feature in your copy of OmniPlan.

If you’re ready to give this rc a try, you can download it here!

Hey OmniPlan planners, 1.6.3 rc 1 has been released!

In this version we fixed an issue where some of the toolbar buttons were disabled, a bug where pressing “G” (for group) when a column was selected would throw up an alert panel, and a couple of new array index errors during Microsoft Project file import.

Please keep in mind that this version is still in development so feedback is encouraged and we apologize if it breaks your computer, corrupts your files, or ruins your weekend.

As always, please let us know if you have any questions or comments. You can contact us directly via our support page or by using the Send Feedback feature in your copy of OmniPlan.

If you’re ready to give this rc a try, you can download it here!

OmniPlan 1.6.2 has been released!

As always, we’d like to thank everyone who provided crash reports, bug reports, and feedback over the last couple of months. If you’d like to read release notes in their entirety you can click here. The highlights of this update include:

As always, please let us know if you have any questions or comments. You can contact us directly via our support page or by using the Send Feedback feature in your copy of OmniPlan.

OmniPlan 1.6.2 is a free and highly recommended update to all registered users of OmniPlan, so fire up your built-in software updater or head to our website and download OmniPlan 1.6.2 today!

Hey OmniPlan planners, 1.6.2 rc 1 has been released!

In this version we fixed a little bug that was capable of disabling dialogs. Other than that, the rest is unchanged and if no one reports any major issues we’ll be going final in a few weeks.

Please keep in mind that this version is still in development so feedback is encouraged and we apologize if it breaks your computer, corrupts your files, or ruins your weekend.

As always, please let us know if you have any questions or comments. You can contact us directly via our support page or by using the Send Feedback feature in your copy of OmniPlan.

If you’re ready to give this rc a try, you can download it here!

Hey OmniPlan planners! Hot on the heels of beta 1, it’s 1.6.2 beta 2!

In this version, we fixed some minor bugs around opening documents read-only when the 14 day trial runs out. We also correctly disable more controls for read-only documents and fixed some broken or misdirected links in the online help content.

On the localization side we fixed a couple of garbled strings in the German localization and tweaked the Japanese localization a little more. Last but not least, the software update and license panels are now correctly localized in many languages.

Please keep in mind that this version is still in development so feedback is encouraged and we apologize if it breaks your computer, corrupts your files, or ruins your weekend.

As always, please let us know if you have any questions or comments. You can contact us directly via our support page or by using the Send Feedback feature in your copy of OmniPlan.

If you’re ready to give this beta a try, you can download it here!

Hey OmniPlan planners, 1.6.2 beta 1 has been released!

In this version, we fixed some memory management issues that we suspect were the cause of the -[OPGanttView drawRect:] crasher we’ve been pursuing. If you’re still getting it, we’d love to know!

We’ve also updated our Japanese localization which fixes broken links in the HTML exports, fixed a rare condition that led to an infinite loop in resource leveling, and fixed a bug preventing documents from being overwritten correctly when saved to AFP filesystems.

Last but not least, we’ve done away with the demo mode limit of 20 tasks and now support unlimited functionality for 14 days. Thereafter the user can open and export plan files, but not edit them. We still need to do some minor tweaks to this so currently the release notes don’t show up on first launch, but you can view them by going to the Help menu.

Please keep in mind that this version is still in development so feedback is encouraged and we apologize if it breaks your computer, corrupts your files, or ruins your weekend.

As always, please let us know if you have any questions or comments. You can contact us directly via our support page or by using the Send Feedback feature in your copy of OmniPlan.

If you’re ready to give this beta a try, you can download it here!