Welcome! What an incredible year we’ve been having!
Back in January’s roadmap, I shared our plans for 2018. The big news from that roadmap was OmniFocus 3—which shipped for iOS in May, and for Mac in September.
Now that isn’t all we’ve been doing: we also shipped a number of major updates to OmniGraffle (improving SVG import/export, line routing, auto layout, mouseless editing, and adding Dark Mode), OmniPlan (making it easier to sync and share projects, and improving its integration with Google Calendar), and OmniOutliner (with version 3 for iOS). And, of course, we also shipped some major updates to support iOS 12’s Shortcuts, Mojave’s Dark Mode, and the new Apple Watch Series 4.
With the release of OmniFocus 3 came a lot of new OmniFocus customers, and I’m afraid this means we haven’t been able to respond to OmniFocus queries within one business day the way we usually do. Let me offer our apologies to anyone who has had to wait longer than usual for a response! Our sales and support teams have been working overtime to catch up, and we’ll get back to each of you as soon as we can. But in the meantime, if you have an urgent issue which is blocking you from using the app please don’t hesitate to escalate your problem to urgent@omnigroup.com so we hear about it sooner.
So what’s next?
If you review our January roadmap and this year’s blog posts, you’ll see that we’ve shipped a lot of the things we’d planned—and a number of things we didn’t. But we’re not done with 2018 yet! The OmniGraffle team is currently working on a number of improvements to our text support. OmniOutliner has a Dark Mode update in public test which is nearly ready to ship. OmniPlan also has a Dark Mode update ready to go, but has been waiting as they try to squeeze in a few last fixes before dropping support for macOS 10.12 (Sierra). And the OmniFocus team is working on adding support for background notifications on Mac.
OmniFocus for the Web has been coming along well, and this week we’ve been sending 1,000 invitations a day to people who have volunteered to help test it at scale. (I anticipate that people who sign up today will be receiving their invitations to help test on Wednesday.)
We’re also working on new options for licensing our software, to make it easier for businesses to buy and deploy our apps. Switching our apps over to free downloads with in-app purchases solved a lot of problems for consumers who purchase our apps through the App Store: enabling free trials, upgrade discounts, and free upgrades for recent purchases. Unfortunately, those changes made it much more difficult for businesses customers to purchase our apps through the App Store, since the Volume Purchase Program (which lets businesses purchase apps) doesn’t support In-App Purchases. We’ve been working on solving this problem, and I’ll be sharing more about that in my next blog post!
Some other items mentioned in January’s roadmap, like OmniFocus automation and collaboration, are still very much in our plans—but we can only work on so many things at once, so they’re unlikely to be done by the end of the year (which is now only two months away!). Stay tuned for more news on those fronts early next year.
Thank you for all your support in 2018! We have some more great releases coming your way in these last few months, and I look forward to sharing our 2019 roadmap in January.
(Feedback? I’d love to hear from you! You can find me on twitter at @kcase, or send me email at kc@omnigroup.com.)
