Got a minute or five? Today, we'd like introduce you to Sal Soghoian's latest project, Omni Automation Vids! These are super quick snackable nuggets to show you tips, techniques, and concepts related to Omni Automation. Each episode is a short video screencast.
What a wonderful bit of news to wake up to! This morning Apple announced the finalists for their Apple App Store Awards for the best apps and games of 2024. For the "Mac App of the Year" category, they wrote these words: "OmniFocus 4, for fostering focus with simplified task management."
Today, the Omni Group is excited to release updates to its entire suite of apps, universally across platforms, ready on day one for macOS 15 Sequoia, iOS 18, iPadOS 18, watchOS 11 and visionOS 2. Plus, OmniFocus 4.4 introduces new functionality for Siri and Shortcuts, and new controls and actions for the Lock Screen, Control Center, and Action Button. Widgets and app icons have been optimized for tinted Home Screen display. And we've brought new gesture and widget support to OmniFocus for Apple Watch!
“Look, Tap, and Approve!” Install Links for Omni Automation plug-ins were originally developed in response to early experiences with the Apple Vision Pro. We like them so much, we implemented them across all platforms—first in OmniFocus and OmniPlan, and now also in OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner!
Apple's annual developer conference (WWDC) always brings exciting news about what will be coming to their platform, and this year's news about Apple Intelligence is no exception! After briefly reflecting on the app updates we've shipped already this year, we look ahead to what Apple Intelligence brings to the platform and how that affects our development roadmap for future updates.
This year's roadmap is a little different from our usual fare, because this year we're starting to work with a whole new spatial computing platform! We've always loved pushing technology forward, with apps ready on day one. We've already shipped OmniPlan for Apple Vision Pro, and today OmniFocus 4.1 enters TestFlight, joining OmniPlan on Apple Vision Pro as our second major visionOS app. We also look forward to bringing OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner to visionOS!
Here at the Omni Group we have a long, rich history of having products ready to ship on day one for Apple’s new platforms. We are pleased to share that the first Omni app on visionOS for the new Apple Vision Pro platform will be OmniPlan, our tool for powerful project management. With OmniPlan for Apple Vision Pro, your Gantt charts are no longer limited by the size of a physical display screen. How cool is that? We’re excited for the future of visionOS—the first spatial computing platform.
Today is the day macOS Sonoma launches, and we're happy to report that our team has tested and updated OmniFocus, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, and OmniPlan for compatibility with macOS Sonoma. (We've even verified that OmniDiskSweeper, OmniPresence, and OmniWeb are all behaving well.) Omni Automation also continues to work smoothly on macOS Sonoma—so all of your scripts and plug-ins should continue working without any issues. And the new interactive widgets in the OmniFocus 4 TestFlight are now available on the Mac!
We know that many of our customers are as excited to upgrade to Apple's latest technologies as we are, so each year we make it a priority to have all of our apps ready for new systems on the day they become available. We're pleased to share with you today that we've tested (and updated as needed) all of our currently shipping apps for compatibility with iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and watchOS 10—so if you're eager to use the new operating systems, our apps are ready.
Fifteen years ago today, on Thursday, July 10, 2008, Apple launched the iPhone App Store. And we launched the first app we ever built which could fit in your pocket, OmniFocus for iPhone—the app which became the #1 top-selling productivity app for the opening weekend of the App Store.
With WWDC now in our rear-view mirror, it's time to share our plans for the rest of the year! We're continuing full steam ahead on OmniFocus 4 and OmniGraffle 8. And peering even further ahead, we look forward to bringing all of our products to Apple's new spatial computing platform!
Our recent focus has been all about simplifying customer experiences, while retaining power and flexibility. To simplify our purchasing experience, we are unlisting our Enterprise SKUs from the App Store—which means the apps remain available to anyone who wants or needs them, but no longer confuse others who stumble across them.
Happy New Year! A tradition in January, we take a moment to reflect on the past year and share a roadmap of the intended journey ahead for 2023. We have a very full schedule ahead of us in 2023 as we redesign and rebuild our two most popular apps, OmniFocus and OmniGraffle, leveraging the latest advancements in Apple technologies.
With our latest shipping updates, all of our apps are ready for both macOS Ventura and iPadOS 16. Along with updating our apps for compatibility, we've brought iPadOS 16's customizable toolbars to all our document-based apps (OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, and OmniPlan).
Our apps are ready for iOS 16, and we hope you enjoy it when it ships next week. Coincidentally, 30 years ago today was the day that NeXTSTEP 3.0 shipped and we registered omnigroup.com!
We've updated our online store so that there's no longer a distinction between team and personal licenses. You can purchase however many licenses you need—traditional up-front licenses or subscriptions—then use them yourself or share them with team members. We've reduced the number of choices each of you have to make when purchasing our software, while still providing flexibility for how you use purchased licenses.
Released today, OmniFocus 3.13 provides a wide range of improvements to Omni Automation---perhaps most notably adding support for Speech Synthesis, but also a number of other improvements as well.
One of the predictable sources of news affecting our plans is Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference, so each year we leave space in our schedule to jump into that firehose of information—and when we emerge, we update our plans and share what we've learned about changes that might affect our roadmap.
For anyone who uses any of our apps on an iPhone or an iPad, we're starting out the year with updates across the board. With these updates, Omni Automation in Shortcuts is available across all of our apps and on all platforms.
Redesigning and rebuilding our apps based on the latest Apple technologies remains our current focus. This ongoing effort has now borne fruit with last year's OmniPlan 4 release, continues with the current OmniFocus 4 TestFlight, and—approaching over the horizon—is expected to lead to an incredible update to OmniGraffle.