• Jellybeans in novelty flavors: Black Licorice, Cumin, Uncoated Aspirin, Gorgonzola

• Foam lightbulb squeeze toy with “I CAN HAZ BRITE IDEAZ?” imprinted on side

• Cadmium-coated fountain pen

• Baby Alive “Wets & Wiggles” doll

• Custom hemp/lanolin blend t-shirt

• Scratch-n-sniff iPads

If you’re going to Macworld, make sure to stop by #760 for some actual non-crappy tradeshow stuff, including an Omni Geek-Friendly Field Notebook. For those that buy our software at the show you’ll receive a 1GB USB stick, lovingly hand-crafted from both bamboo and awesome.

We hope to see you there!

OmniPad

Robin!

• 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!

From the course description:

In OmniGraffle Professional 5 Essential Training, Jason Osder shows how to go from idea to fully developed illustration with this powerful diagramming tool for the Mac. OmniGraffle is designed to handle everything from diagrams, process charts, and web site mockups, to page layouts, and even info-rich map graphics. Jason demonstrates how to organize this wide variety of documents using canvases and layers, and work with basic diagram elements such as shapes, lines, and text. He also shares timesaving techniques, such as using pre-made stencils, snapping for auto alignment, and auto layouts, so users can create documents quickly and efficiently. Advanced skills for the professional user are also introduced, including adding interactivity and developing custom shapes. Exercise files are included with this course.

Topics Include:
€ – Creating and manipulating shapes
€ – Finding and adding stencils
€ – Applying diagram styles
€ – Importing content
€ – Displaying diagrams in Presentation mode

Duration:
- 1.75 Hours

You can learn more about Lynda.com’s subscription programs here. Enjoy!

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.

Anyway, if you happen to have made some resolutions this year, how do you plan to stay on top of them? With some software, perhaps? Maybe even some Omni software? (Is my incessant eyebrow-waggling and elbow-jabbing getting annoying yet? HMMM?) Let us take a look at some of our fine productivity applications, with creating and managing resolutions in mind.

First, OmniGraphSketcher. If you’re anything like me the idea of spending your free time creating graphs is about as appealing as, oh, creating pie charts. Which is to say, not all that appealing. Unless there’s actual pie involved.

At first I wasn’t sure how to translate my goals into graphs, but the more I thought about it the more ideas popped into my mind. Here’s an example of the progress I’ve made towards one of my 2010 resolutions, which is to run a half marathon on February 28th:

These charts document the training runs I did in November and December, with the bar chart representing the miles I ran, and the line graph along the top representing my pace.

Now, as our lead OmniGraphSketcher developer gently chided me, this isn’t exactly a best practice example, because they have different y-scales. Which I think means I should have created separate graphs for pace and mileage to make it more clear what I’m analyzing. But I kind of like the way it looks as is, so you’ll just have to pardon my rebellion.

I’ll be honest, I hadn’t played with OmniGraphSketcher much before putting these documents together, and what do you know, the things we say about it are actually true! It’s super easy to use, it’s nowhere near as painful as certain other programs that rhyme with Shmexel, and the results are very pretty even if you’re kind of a mouthbreather when it comes to data visualization. And hey, how motivating is it to actually see the steps you’ve made towards completing a goal? Much more rewarding than, say, counting your foot blisters.

Moving on to OmniFocus! OmniFocus is probably the most obvious choice for goal management, and the key to making the most of it is turning those high-level ambitions into actionable next steps. There’s, you know, a whole school of thought on how to do this (you may have heard of a little system called Getting Things Done?), but the idea is to spend some time thinking about what you need to do in order to keep that resolution. A nebulous, undefined goal doesn’t do you much good, right?

Bad:

Better:

One option for managing your big goals in OmniFocus is to keep an action simply titled “Review 2010 Resolutions” (or whatever), and set it to repeat every few months. Note that dragging a project or action into the note field of another will create a link back to the first item, so you can add little shortcuts from your resolution items to their respective projects.

Lastly, OmniGraffle! Perhaps unsurprisingly, the overall Omni response to my request for personal goal-focused information that I could slap on our public blog was not unlike a Zork session:

>SEND EMAIL
Time passes.

Eventually after some truly pathetic begging on my part (the things I do for this blog! And you thought I just posted silly links and typos!), one of our esteemed Support Ninjas, Kris, sent over a really neat OmniGraffle document that’s modeled after a chalkboard he and his partner have in their home. The top and bottom circles represent their individual goals, with their mutual goals in the yellow center circle.

Goals inside the circle are targeted for 2010, goals on the border are within the next year or two, and anything outside of the circle is scheduled for the two to five year range. “We use this to be clear about what our priorities are and where we’re at with them—not to mention all the secret juju that comes from visualization,” said Kris, right before he whipped a throwing star at my head for mocking his desire to learn the banjo.

He also shared these tips:

“The cool thing about having a Graffle doc of this is that it’s easy to edit, rearrange, re-prioritize and add new things as they come up… then reflect those changes at home. I can keep a PDF copy of the file with me so that when I’m out shopping (for instance) I can pull up the ol’ Goal Board and evaluate the purchase against my priorities. Also, the actual Graffle doc has this really cool capability where you can assign an action to an object—clicking an object (with the selection tool) will open a URL, a file, run an applescript, etc. I use this to link to things that I desperately want—again, the mystical power of visualization. I also use this to link to my OmniFocus projects that reflect these goals.”

Awesome, right? Don’t ever question the power of visualization, people.

So! How about you folks? Do you have any tips to share for making all your MMX dreams come true?

If you encounter any problems or have a question, please contact us at omnioutliner@omnigroup.com or by using the Help -> Send Feedback option in the app. Thanks!

Version 1.5 incorporates a lot of improvements that were suggested (or written!) by kind folks in the Mac community. This time around, Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software was especially helpful in making sure our indexing process works equally well on Snow Leopard and earlier versions of Mac OS X.

And thanks to Automator, Helpify is now an applet, not just a command-line script. You can drop your source outline right on it. Other new niceties include variables stored inside the source outline instead of inside the script, and better handling of anchors that appear at the top of a page.

I hope you find this new version of Helpify useful. Please let us know what you think!

Download Helpify 1.5