The Omni Group CEO Ken Case came to this year's Macworld Expo to pitch his company's productivity apps to those using Macs and iOS devices to get work done. These days, that could mean heading in to a cubicle at a large corporation, working with a small business or just being your own boss. We sat down with Case to see what Omni has in store for 2011, which includes a major update to OmniPlan (with OmniFocus integration), and bringing OmniOutliner to the iPad.
When we spoke with Case last year, he was excited about the prospect of moving Omni's productivity apps to the large touchscreen interface of the iPad. He predicted the iPad would be big—"this is the computer my dad should have had," he told Ars—and Apple's numbers for fiscal first quarter of 2011 say he was right.
Last year, Omni put a hold on updating its Mac OS X apps to focus on iPad development. The company subsequently released iPad versions of OmniGraphSketch for visualizing data, OmniGraffle for creating charts and diagrams, and OmniFocus, its GTD-based task manager.
Apple then announced the Mac App Store, and Omni decided to ready its Mac OS X apps for the launch. "There are advantages to selling via the Mac App Store for lots of our customers, and we've replaced our retail distribution completely with the Mac App Store," Case told Ars. "The response has been far better than sales via traditional retail channels."
But, Case said, the Mac App Store hasn't replaced direct online sales. "We continue to offer direct sales to individuals and businesses because we have more flexibility to offer upgrade pricing, or bulk licenses for our business customers." Those who previously purchased Omni apps direct will continue to receive upgrades and support through those channels, while those that discover Omni's software via the Mac App Store will get upgrades that way as well.
With a large iOS presence established and having migrated retail distribution to the Mac App Store, earnest work on Mac OS X apps has resumed. Case told Ars that the long-awaited version 2.0 of OmniPlan, the company's project management software, is being targeted for release in about three to six months (though he prefers not to call it a hard deadline). "We don't want to be another 'Duke Nuke 'Em,' but we'd rather spend a few extra months getting the update right than hit an arbitrary deadline," he said.
An important part of the OmniPlan update is a new database back-end that is optimized for cloud syncing and collaborative planning. This, along with change tracking, allows multiple project managers to use OmniPlan on the desktop to manage large projects or keep track of a team's progress. The cloud syncing service is built to work with any WebDAV server, so users can use iDisk, their own server, or use Omni Group's free hosted service.
"We actually host over 10,000 users on one Mac mini," Case said, explaining that as long as the service can scale on such modest hardware, Omni will continue to offer free syncing. However, some corporate customers would likely prefer to host their own data for security purposes, and WebDAV gives them an easy way to do that with minimal effort.
The new syncing back-end is also designed to work with OmniFocus, which will let individual team members sync tasks assigned to them with either the desktop, iPhone, or iPad versions. "All three versions use the same underlying engine, so once we have that update in place, we'll be able to roll out OmniPlan syncing to all versions of OmniFocus," Case told Ars.
The current version of OmniPlan allows syncing via CalDAV, but the new engine will offer much better integration with OmniFocus. For project team members who don't need to see what all other team members are working on, they'll be able to see just the tasks assigned to them. When tasks are marked as complete in OmniFocus, the project manager will get a notification of the change in OmniPlan.
OmniFocus 2 for Mac OS X is also coming later this year. The desktop version will be getting a major interface overhaul largely based on feedback from users of the iPhone and iPad versions. "Our users told us that the iOS version is actually the best—that they wish the desktop version work more like it," Case said.
Finally, an iPad version of OmniOutliner is also in the works. UI work is still in progress, but Case showed us an early version to give an idea of what we can expect. The underlying code is, like many of Omni's other apps, largely shared between the desktop and iOS versions. Much of the work is making sure everything works well with touch interaction while maintaining a clear presentation of outline data.
As far as long-term plans are concerned, Case said that Omni Group is evaluating ways to bring its productivity apps to both Windows and Android. Since OmniFocus works with cloud syncing, Case said he's considering building Web-based version as an alternative to building native clients on other plaforms. "I'm not interested in becoming a Windows coder, or an Android coder," Case explained, "but we have a lot of requests to bring OmniFocus in particular to those platforms."
reader comments
8