From the making-sure-folks-know dept: we’re looking to add a web software test pilot to our QA team. Check our jobs page for details and info on how to apply!

I was going to write a post about managing New Year’s resolutions, then I thought maybe the topic of New Year’s resolutions has gotten kind of tired and no one even does them any more, then I thought well it’s still a good subject because everyone’s got goals no matter what time of year it is, then I got distracted by this photo and laughed for about ten straight minutes because HAAAAAA, then my boss was all hey have you got that new blog entry written yet, and I was like OH YES INDEED JUST FORMATTING THE HTMSQLCSSWTF FOR THE WEB INTERFUNCTION.

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?

The first Omni release of 2010! No new features here, but if you used OmniOutliner in Chinese you probably noticed that it was showing up in another language! Sorry about that, the Chinese localization was missing in the 3.9.4 release but it’s back now! You can download this version from our site or using the software updater.

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!

Hello! It’s kind of strange to think that it’s been over a year since I first posted Helpify. If you haven’t met it, Helpify is a tool for Mac developers to generate Apple Help Books for their software. We use it here, of course, and it has seen a bit of popularity outside of Omni too.

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

OmniOutliner 3.9.4 is now available which fixes a compatibility issue a few Automator actions had. It also contains localized versions of the updated help file from version 3.9.3 as well as a couple export bug fixes.

Thank you everyone who helped test the 3.9.4 betas to make sure the new build process didn’t introduce any bugs, we appreciate the help!

When you’re ready, you can grab this version through OmniOutliner’s software updater or from our site where you will also find the full release notes. And as always, if you have any questions or run into trouble, please email us at omnioutliner@omnigroup.com or use the Help -> Send Feedback option in the app.

Did you know that Photoshop files can be dragged straight into OmniGraffle documents? It’s super true! I’ve been taking this for granted, but it was a lovely surprise when I tried it on a whim and it, yeah, “just worked”.

That one discovery pretty drastically improved my interface design workflow. Before that, having to export to PNG for every change to any graphic in a mockup meant that I didn’t go into Photoshop very often, and I used OmniGraffle to create graphics whenever I could get away with it. Well, OmniGraffle is a superb diagramming app, and it can even hold its own for a lot of graphics work, but it’s not Photoshop. Sometimes you just need those layer styles, shape layers, and masks.

Here’s how I’ve been doing it:

• Working on a mockup in OmniGraffle, realize I need a graphic.
• Switch to Photoshop, create the graphic, and save the file.
• Click and hold on the document icon in the Photoshop window’s title bar, then drag it to the OmniGraffle canvas.
• Take advantage of OmniGraffle’s guides, alignment controls, grouping, tables, and other conveniences to arrange things just right.
• If the graphic needs to change, make the adjustments in Photoshop and save again.
• Just drag the new version right on top of the existing object on the OmniGraffle canvas to replace it.

The screenshot is an actual in-development inspector design for a future Omni product! (With all of its text replaced by neologisms from Finnegans Wake, of course.)

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.