You may have read this over at 43 Folders, but for anyone who missed it, we're super-thrilled to announce that Ethan Schoonover is going to be joining The Omni Group in the next few weeks. As some of you know, we've been working with him for quite a while during OmniFocus's development, and having him actually in the same building as us is going to be awesome.
Well, awesome for us, anyway. Ethan's probably going to run screaming after a day or two. Oh ha ha ha, I kid, we're not that bad.
(ETHAN: YOU MIGHT NEED A LOT OF BEER).
Ethan will officially be on board at the start of September, he just has to move his family and belongings from Hong Kong to Seattle first. Which should prep him nicely for the feat of helping us heave OmniFocus towards a final ship date.
And speaking of OmniFocus, we have another good bit of news: we're all caught up with issuing sneaky peek invitations, and we've configured the mailing list to automatically send invitations within 24 hours of signup.
It almost sounds like this is now a public beta, doesn't it? Not quite yet. As I understand it, the reason we're not just making everything instantly available—without the added process of joining the list—is that first we want the app to be stable enough so that people can download it once and not worry about updating the build. Currently, the sneaky peek page has the last 5 builds available at all times, and we're encouraging everyone to continually get new updates.
If you'd like to give OmniFocus a try, you can certainly do so—just keep in mind that it's still a work in progress and you'll probably need to stay on top of the new versions we keep posting. That way you have access to the latest bug fixes, new features, improved UI, and occasionally, things that are horribly horribly broken in a number of mysterious and painful ways. O, the joys of building software!
On the other hand, if you'd like to wait until we release a version that you can use for more than a few days at a time, hang in there for the public beta. The timing remains uncertain, but we are certainly working our butts off on reaching that milestone.
I should clarify that by “we” I mean “everyone except the office cat” because her main job lately seems to involve producing repulsive horked-up hairballs in various, easily-stepped on places throughout our offices. And with that:
Welcome, Ethan! We're so excited to have you. Watch out for cat barf.
