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!

First things first, if you haven’t already seen this incredible video, may I recommend doing so? You’ll want to load it in HD full-screen mode, let it buffer, then just kick back and relax. (Via the always-awesome Kottke.)

Next up: what’s Omni been doing lately? Let me break it down for you bullet-style:

• Preparing for Snow Leopard! Engineers are madly adding Snow Leopard updates to all our shipping apps, with the goal of having everything ready the day Snow Leopard is. I don’t exactly know how this works, if they just . . . physically stuff an actual leopard in there, or what (aw, who’s a snuggly? You are!), but they seem very busy.

• Starting sneaky peeks of OmniFocus 1.7! LOTS of changes in the works, and you can get the rundown here. Warning: running an alpha version isn’t for everyone, but if you don’t mind, you know, living on the edge a little, the very latest builds are being constantly made available via our sneaky peek page.

• OmniWeb 5.10 sneaky peek updating! Speaking of sneaky peeks (the more I type that term, the goofier it sounds. So SNEAKY, these peeks), the work-in-progress version of OmniWeb, 5.10, has just been updated with the latest WebKit (from Safari 4.0.3) and has several improvements to its built-in software update (including the ability to ignore a particular update).

Questions? Feedback? Cool links to share? Chat us up in the comments.

SEATTLE, Washington – April 1, 2009 — The Omni Group has announced a major update to their web browser, OmniWeb. OmniWeb 5.9.2 is now the only WebKit web browser that offers support for Gopher protocol.

Gopher is a revolutionary network protocol that allows users to search and retrieve items from the Internet such as documents and graphic images. Using Gopher, it’s possible to access many types of content over computers: text-based files, mailing lists, even photos.

“Gopher support is something we’ve been working on for a long time,” said Ken Case, Omni Group CEO. “Now OmniWeb users have the rare opportunity to retrieve data from other servers on the Internet without the complications of using an FTP program. Using nothing more than a simple menu program, users have unprecedented access to the world’s information systems. For instance, just today I was able to access a weather report via Gopher, so I knew to bring my umbrella to work. The future is now!”

OmniWeb 5.9.2 is a free download with no licensing restrictions, and the latest version can be found at <http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/>.

About The Omni Group
One of the first companies to develop software for the Mac OS X platform, the Omni Group is today a leading developer for Apple products and has designed several productivity applications for Mac OS X and iPhone. Founded in 1993, The Omni Group is located in Seattle, Washington.

In case you missed the news last week, OmniWeb is now free!

But that doesn’t mean that we’ve stopped developing OmniWeb: we’ve been posting new sneaky peek builds of the upcoming OmniWeb 5.9.1 release nearly every day since that announcement. If you hop on over to OmniWeb’s sneaky peek page and check out the latest release notes, you’ll see that we’ve added support for three-finger swipes on recent laptops, made the tab drawer automatically close when you return to a single tab, fixed the Amazon rating system bug, reimplemented speech input and the Summarize toolbar item, and more!

We’ve also gotten pretty far with integrating the new Safari 4 beta engine: it’s now integrated into our internal builds of OmniWeb 6, and we’re bringing that work back to OmniWeb 5 so it can make it into the 5.9 sneaky peek builds.

Come visit OmniWeb’s sneaky peek page and see what we’ve been up to!

If you missed our announcement earlier today or this Macworld article, here’s the latest from Omni HQ: OmniWeb, OmniDazzle, OmniDiskSweeper, and OmniObjectMeter are now available as freeware. That’s right: they’re free. You can go download them right now if you want. FOR FREE.

Go ahead, we’ll wait.

In anticipation of some curiosity as to why we made this decision:

So . . . uh, why?
We’ve been thinking about this for a while, especially with regards to OmniWeb. Because we’re a small company and we don’t have unlimited engineering resources, by necessity certain projects are going to take up more of our attention. Instead of continuing to charge for these four applications, which aren’t getting updated as frequently as our other titles, we felt it would better serve the community to make them available at no cost.

Wait! Does this mean you’re discontinuing these products?
No. We aren’t ruling out future updates at all, and we’re keeping our options open. We have lots of ideas for what we’d like to add to these products, and it’s possible that at some point we’ll have more resources to allocate to them.

Is Omni . . . going out of business? OMG!
Absolutely not. We just had our best year ever, and we’re continuing to grow. In fact, we’re hiring right now! Tell your talented developer friends!

You SAY free, but I bet I have to fill out a form or send in personal information or otherwise be subjected to some sort of annoying marketing activity to get these apps, RIGHT?
Nope. Just click that fancy “download” button, and you’re good to go.

If you have any actual questions that I didn’t just make up, please, feel free to leave them in the comments — we’ll try to address everything we can.

It’s been available as a sneaky peek release for some time now. Well, we decided it was time to make a final release and share it with the non sneaky peek world. OmniWeb 5.8 is based on the same version of WebKit in use by Safari 3.1.x and shares the same features and security enhancements. We also snuck in a few other small bug fixes as well as additional tweaking to the toolbar icons, see the complete release notes for more details and download links.

We’re happy to announce the final release for OmniWeb 5.7. If you have not been following our beta releases there are a number of updates to the interface and underlying engine, you can find a complete list of what’s new on our downloads page. We recommend this release for all users as it improves site compatibility and stability in many areas. Enjoy!

OmniWeb 5.7 is a free update to registered users of OmniWeb 5.

OmniWeb 5.7 now has a second beta with a few changes that we hope many will find useful. First if you like your OmniWeb in something other than English, our generous volunteers have given us updates to both the French and Chinese localizations. Regardless of the language you speak, we’ve also fixed a crash that could occur when pressing undo after closing a tab. Enjoy beta 2!

Go download and read up on the complete release notes here!

Please say hello to OmniWeb 5.7 beta 1! If you’ve been using our sneaky peeks of 5.7 you may have already seen most of these features go by, however for those that haven’t there is a tasty list of bug fixes and small enhancements that we’ve put into this release. New icons, security enhancements improvements to stability and increased performance are all on the plate. Oh and you can send the contents of a page via email now if that’s the sort of thing you like to do. Take a look at the complete list and download here.

Enjoy the weekend!

Okay okay. I admit it. If you’ve been following along with our sneaky peeks during 5.6 development there isn’t a whole lot new here. But I must take this opportunity to thank all of you testers out there because none of this would be possible without you.

But! If you haven’t been running the sneaky peeks, this little bit of news that OmniWeb 5.6 is now totally complete and ready for your downloading slash browsing slash enjoying pleasure may be just the bit of news you need to top your day! New updated rendering engine (about a year and a half of development has gone into this thanks to the WebKit crew). Inline PDF support, Web Inspector, support for the Drosera JavaScript debugger, improved JavaScript and plug-in support are all there. Bug fixes to syncing the UI and bookmarks, crashes and other stability issues have been corrected. We’ve even made sure that upgrading to leopard will go smoothly for you. So if you’ve experienced some performance problems, have had trouble displaying pages or, you know, plan to upgrade your OS this Friday…

Go give it a try! Download and release notes can be found here.