The Omni Show

Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com Ken Case, CEO of The Omni Group; Dave Messent, OmniFocus product manager; and Tim Ekl, OmniFocus engineer, join the show for a special episode to talk about HEY IT’S LAUNCH DAY WOO-HOO! We look back on the two years of work on this release — all the database and syncing groundwork, new user interface, and new features — and how all these different pieces didn’t come together until near the end. But then they did! While the app looks familiar — which is entirely by design — this release is a much more dramatic improvement than it appears on the surface. And we’re very proud of the whole team. And now our Support Humans, who’ve done so marvelously well during the beta program, get even busier as OmniFocus 3 is now available on the App Store. We’ve got WWDC next week, and our designers, engineers, and testers are back to working on OmniFocus for Mac, OmniFocus for the Web, and more new features for OmniFocus 3 for iOS. It’s almost the company motto: “Work continues!” You can find Ken @kcase on Twitter, Dave @dmessent, and Tim @timothyekl and on the web. You can also find @omnigroup on Twitter and on Micro.blog.

Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com Ken Case, CEO of The Omni Group, and Dave Messent, OmniFocus product manager, join the show for a special episode to talk about the enhancements to custom perspectives, a feature in OmniFocus Pro 3. Custom perspectives now work with tags (new in OmniFocus 3), which make for even more powerful ways to view your data. The perspective editor has been enhanced to make perspectives easier to set up, by showing you just what you need to see at any given moment. And the editor now supports complex queries: you can combine and filter using all, any, and none. And plus — bonus points — you can not only set a custom icon (any image) for each custom perspective, you can also set a tint color! Which is a small thing, sure, but is surprisingly nice. :) You can find Ken @kcase and Dave @dmessent on Twitter. You can also find @omnigroup on Twitter and on Micro.blog.

Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com Shannon Hughes — French toast enjoyer, math understander, frequent robot — joins the show to talk about working on OmniGraffle. Which, apparently, involves a whole bunch of different types of rectangles. Shannon started at Omni a week before your host, and started out on the OmniGraffle team and has been there ever since. Your rectangles are in the best possible hands. Some other people, places, and things mentioned: Andrea McVittie Robot OmniGraffle Adobe Illustrator Dave Messent Rectangle Undo Wil Shipley on Git as Document Format Omni and Customer Data Lotus 1-2-3 Punch cards Dot matrix paper AltaVista Lycos Excite Yahoo Society for Creative Anachronism Mead Linguistics Barnes and Noble Impostor Syndrome NSCoders Table views Bog Butterflies Hummingbirds

Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com Dave Messent, OmniFocus product manager; Tim Ekl, OmniFocus engineer; and Jim Correia, OmniFocus engineer join the show for a special episode to talk about OmniFocus 3 for iOS and several new features: flexible inspectors, enhanced repeating tasks, batch editing, and the interleaved Forecast view. In OmniFocus 3 for iOS, inspectors are now customizable: you can make them work the way you want them to work. We’ve given repeated tasks more real-world options — such as the last weekday of the month — and we’ve applied progressive disclosure to the interface so they’re easy to set up. Batch editing — which makes making bulk changes easier — was brought over from the Mac to iOS. And in the Forecast view we’ve interleaved tasks and calendar events, which makes it easy to plan and to see how your day fits together. You can find Dave @dmessent on Twitter, Tim on Twitter @timothyekl and on the web, and Jim on Twitter @jimcorreia. For more about OmniFocus 3, read the Omni Roadmap 2018 — particularly the second half, which concentrates on OmniFocus — and listen to a previous episode of the show where Ken Case talks about the roadmap, and listen to another previous special episode where we talk about OmniFocus 3 and tags. Also see the OmniFocus 3 development blog, which is just starting up (at this writing) and will have more details as we post more.

Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com Aaron Bendickson — system administrator, saint — talks about how he runs things at Omni and, especially, about how he fixes things. Aaron’s just a small town boy from Missoula who went big: he studied at Berklee College of Music and eventually made his way to Seattle by way of Tacoma. When he’s not fixing Omni things, he’s bicycling, competing in pinball matches, and being a dad. You can find Aaron @benaar on Twitter and on Instagram. Some other people, places, and things mentioned: Office Space The spice must flow PowerMac Ainsley Bourque Olson OmniBugZapper Ken Case WebDAV Apache MySQL OmniFocus FreeBSD Linux Telepresence Jousting Craig’s List Tacoma Missoula, Montana Lake Missoula Berklee College of Music Boston Americana music Dad rock Pro Tools PCI cards VHS tape Internet GarageBand Commodore 64 Turtle graphics Apple IIe DOS VisiCalc Lotus 1-2-3 WordPerfect Tetris MechWarrior PowerMac 6100 PowerPC Bee Gees Hanson University Place Doc Brown and Marty Biometrics CIA UNIX Pinball Shorty’s Seattle Center Tacoma Convention Center White Water pinball game Dennis Nordman Coindexter’s Contras Iran-Contra Admiral Poindexter Contra game

Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com Dave Messent, OmniFocus product manager, and Tim Ekl, OmniFocus engineer, join the show for a special episode to talk about OmniFocus 3 (for Mac and iOS) and tags. In the new OmniFocus, tags replace contexts. Tags can do everything contexts can do, and more — you can apply multiple tags to tasks and projects, where with contexts you could apply just one. Dave and Tim go into detail on how this all works, and they discuss some of the organization and workflows that tags enable. You can find Dave @dmessent on Twitter, and you can find Tim on Twitter @timothyekl and on the web For more about tags, you read the Omni Roadmap 2018 — particularly the second half, which concentrates on OmniFocus — and listen to a previous episode of the show where Ken Case talks about the roadmap. Also see the OmniFocus 3 development blog, which is just starting up (at this writing) and will have more details as we post more.

Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com Dave Lonning — world-traveler, world-builder — joins the show to talk about writing documentation for Omni apps — and about how the tools and formats have changed over the years. He also talks about moving, after college, to Japan — where he taught English and later worked on video game localization. He was there in 2011 when a devastating earthquake and tsunami hit. Dave’s hobbies include role-playing games — running and creating — and painting miniatures. And, most importantly, he’s a cat person who’s learned to love the office canids. You can find Dave @zroundbls on Twitter. Some other people, places, and things mentioned: Apple Help format Apple Help Viewer OmniOutliner Python WebView EPUB iBooks PDF MultiMarkdown OmniGraffle OmniFocus OmniPlan OmniGraphSketcher The bus to work Documentation at support.omnigroup.com Apple-II-compatible Laser 128 Performa 405 Silo Macalaster College Japan The Last Samurai All your base are belong to us PCs 2011 Japanese Earthquake William Van Hecke Seattle Interbay Caffe Appassionato Role-playing games (RPGs) Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) Pathfinder Painting miniatures Cat Made-up languages The Rocketeer

Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com Ainsley Bourque Olson — knitter, cat person, OmniPlan planner — joins the show to talk about being the product manager of a project management app. And about how to go from Apple retail to world domination. And about how to get by in Norwegian Ballard. You can find Ainsley @ainslaw on Twitter and on Instagram. Some other people, places, and things mentioned: Canada Product Management WWDC Apple Ken Case Project Management OmniGraffle OmniFocus Getting Things Done (GTD) Gantt Chart Waterfall management Network diagram Project Levelling Las Vegas Monte Carlo simulation Microsoft Project Windows UW Continuing Education Program Omni internal tools OmniPresence OmniDiskSweeper WebDAV Nova Scotia University of Washington Bondi blue iMac Family tree diagram Political Science Apple Store University Village Pages Numbers Aaron Cherof Pneumonia King of Norway Syttende Mai Parade in Ballard Knitting Ballard’s Brewery District Stoup Cats Derek Motonaga Linus and Lucy

Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com Orion Protonentis — swashbuckler, bug-hunter, pastry-enjoyer — joins the show to talk about testing Omni apps. And about his life on the stage with swords. After studying acting and stage combat in Hawaii, Tennessee, and Las Vegas, and after tending bar and running nightclubs, Orion — whose first computers were Commodore 64, TRS-80, and Apple II — answered the call to come do support at The Omni Group. He later made his way to the test department, where he’s been finding bugs — so you don’t have to. You can find Orion @orionp on Twitter and on Micro.blog. Some other people, places, and things mentioned: Orion Ares Invisible Hair X-Men OmniGraffle OmniFocus Apple Watch OmniOutliner Valentine‘s Day OmniPlan Ken’s Roadmap Blog Post OmniWeb, OmniDiskSweeper Liz Marley Brian Covey Ken Case Portland University of Oregon Trash-80 Conan the Barbarian Living Videotext ThinkTank MORE Sophocles Shakespeare Scimitar Star Wars The Princess Bride Sword Fight Society of American Fight Directors Fight Choreography The Globe Theater Julius Caesar The Scottish Play Twelfth Night Seattle Opera The Nightmare Before Christmas

Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com Ken Case, CEO and one of the founders of The Omni Group, talks about what we accomplished in 2017 and what we plan to do in 2018. It’s a big year, especially for OmniFocus 3 for Mac and iOS. You can read all about it: see Omni Roadmap 2018 on our blog. And go back in time, if you like, to the 2017 roadmap. And 2016 and 2015. You can find Ken @kcase on Twitter. You can also find @omnigroup on Twitter and on Micro.blog.