The Omni Group’s 2013: OmniFocus 2, OmniOutliner 4, New “OmniPresence” Sync

In a post published on the company’s blog, The Omni Group CEO Ken Case has detailed their plans for the first quarter of 2013. In the upcoming months, The Omni Group will unveil OmniFocus 2, OmniOutliner 4, and a new sync engine based on open web standards called OmniPresence.

OmniFocus 2 will officially be announced on January 31, during the week of Macworld/iWorld. As expected, it will bring a redesign inspired by the iPad app, dedicated review and forecast modes, a clearer navigation, and “a fresh look and feel”. An OmniFocus 2 private beta will be given to attendees of the private event. Another major update will be OmniOutliner 4: as explained by Case, the original OmniOutliner 3 was released in 2005, before Apple’s transition to Intel processors for Macs. With version 4.0, The Omni Group has “completely rebuilt” the outlining engine to support zooming text, showing and hiding columns, and a better handling of attachments. As an OmniOutliner user myself (I used the app to build a massive outline for my Mountain Lion review earlier this year), I have to say I’m looking forward to OmniOutliner’s update in particular as the app feels outdated at this point.

The biggest news in my opinion is OmniPresence, Omni’s new automatic document syncing. Based on open web protocols, OmniPresence will run on The Omni Group’s Omni Sync Server as well as other cloud servers users can set up on their own. It will support Omni’s apps and, on OS X, even syncing of documents from other apps configured with the service.

OmniPresence is not limited to syncing with a single cloud, either: you can choose which folders to sync with which clouds. This means that teams can set up separate folders in separate clouds, and you can access files from any of them on each of your devices.

Because it’s open and you can host your own cloud, OmniPresence is designed to sync any documents you want: it’s not limited to syncing documents created by our apps. In fact, on the desktop OmniPresence is completely independent of our other apps: if you wish, you can use it to sync TextEdit documents! (But when using OmniPresence with non-Omni apps, we’ll ask that you limit the amount of space you use on our Omni Sync Server since we can’t provide infinite storage to everyone for free. On your own cloud server, though, do whatever you want!)

I have been running my own OmniFocus syncing server for months, but lately I went back to using the Omni Sync Server — initially out of curiosity to see whether it had improved over the past months. Not only is it faster, The Omni Group has also started testing features exclusive to their service, such as Mail Drop. That’s the reason I’m excited about OmniPresence: it’s an open standard and it’ll work with other apps and your own server, but I have no doubt The Omni Group will enhance their hosted solution with better integration with their apps.

Read the details of The Omni Group’s future updates here.

OmniFocus Mail Drop Beta

As noted by Sven Fechner, a post by The Omni Group on the company’s forums publicly describes a new feature of Omni Sync Server: Mail Drop. An enhancement to OmniFocus’ existing support for Mail.app, Mail Drop is a proper way to email tasks directly to your OmniFocus inbox.

We call this new feature the “OmniFocus Mail Drop”. Unlike previous mail-processing features, we wanted a method that wouldn’t require any of your devices to be present in order to add items to OmniFocus, we wanted to add the much-requested better attachment support, and we wanted to reduce the amount of extra work you had to do in order to get your items into OmniFocus as much as possible.

To this end, we implemented the feature as part of the Omni Sync Server. Accounts on the server can now have a special email address generated. Any message forwarded or sent to that address will be processed (including attachments) and added to your OmniFocus database right there on the server. (If a spammer gets ahold of your Mail Drop address, we give you a way to generate a new one.)

I have been testing Mail Drop for the past few days, and, indeed, it works as advertised. Once generated in your Omni Sync Server’s account page, you’ll get a unique email address you can send tasks to. Unlike previous solutions, this is a real “cloud capture” tool: you don’t need a Mac to be always running to turn emails into tasks, as everything will be processed server-side by Omni Sync Server.

Right now, Mail Drop doesn’t seem to support OmniFocus’ email syntax for adding tasks, but it’s really fast. In my tests, tasks sent via email using Mail Drop were added in seconds to my Omni Sync Server account.

Personally, I think this is the right path to follow. As our devices become increasingly interconnected and “always-on”, it doesn’t make sense anymore to make task management — arguably a fundamental part of many’s workflows — simply “local”. People have been asking for a real web-based OmniFocus for years, and Mail Drop is a good start. I have been running my own OmniFocus server using Drafts’ email actions to quickly add tasks, but I welcome the user-friendliness of Mail Drop as a promising indication of OmniFocus’ cloud future.

The Omni Group Previews OmniPlan for iPad, iCloud Sync Coming To iPad Apps

At Macworld|iWorld 2012, which kicked off yesterday in San Francisco, iOS and Mac developer The Omni Group offered a first preview of an initial build of OmniPlan for iPad, and detailed some of their upcoming plans for the suite of apps they offer to Mac, iPhone, and iPad users.

As reported by Ars Technica, an iPad version of The Omni Group’s project planning and management application, OmniPlan, should be released in the second quarter of 2012. That puts it right on schedule for a possible WWDC release, although The Omni Group’s CEO Ken Case didn’t commit to a specific ETA when commenting on the app’s release. Similarly, Case didn’t give any details on pricing, except that we should expect the same pattern that happened with the Mac versions of OmniFocus and OmniGraffle – the iPad apps being sold at roughly half the price, yet with equally powerful functionalities.

Chris Foresman writes:

When we spoke to Case at the Macworld Expo last year, he told us about the company’s plans to update OmniPlan on Mac OS X to version 2.0. That version included a major overhaul to the backend engine, which improved cloud syncing abilities and offered integration with the GTD-based task manager OmniFocus. OmniPlan for the iPad will use the same engine, making it possible for multiple users to update project plans simultaneously. Those changes can be reviewed, approved, or rejected using the iPad just as on the desktop.

The early build we saw this week wasn’t complete, but the UI made full use of pinch and swipe gestures to control how much of a project’s timeline was in focus at any given time. Multitouch gestures also make it easy to manipulate task times and connect tasks and milestones to others to establish dependencies.

For current Omni customers, Case has confirmed that iPad versions of OmniGraffle, OmniGraphSketcher and OmniOutliner will get a new document management interface with iCloud support. The change is much needed as Omni’s current document-based sync isn’t the most automatic or user-friendly out there, and iCloud would hopefully make everything easier and reliable, while still keeping the old webDAV and exporting options available.

Looks like it’s going to be another great year for The Omni Group.

The Omni Group’s Lion Update Stats

The Omni Group has updated its software update statistics document with Lion data:

Because we’re nice folks who want to help the development community, we’ve decided to make the information we gather public (in aggregate form) so that you can also benefit from this knowledge.

Below you’ll find statistical information about all collected configurations to date. The information is provided as-is. We’re not going to tell you exactly how many individual users have submitted the information, nor can we place any guarantee on the accuracy of this information. Remember, this is not a poll of the Mac OS X community at large, just a subset of our customer base.

Looking at the data, you can see how OmniFocus (by far Omni Group’s most popular app) shows a steep Lion usage increase in July (obviously), and a gradual growth throughout January 2012, whereas lesser known apps like OmniWeb have shown an initial decline in user adoption of the latest OS, then stable updates. Surprisingly, OmniOutliner users don’t seem to upgrade to Lion much.