It’s that time of year again! We spend a lot of time creating new things, but we also value our traditions. One of those traditions is to set aside some time at the beginning of each year to reflect on the past and to share plans for the future: our roadmap. It’s not a perfect oracle, since the future is never certain! But we hope it’s useful when we share where we’ve come from and the direction in which we’re headed.
It’s been nearly five years since Omni last worked together in an office, rather than working together remotely. There are certainly things we miss about being in the same place! It was great to be able to walk down the hall to a whiteboard to puzzle through a problem—and beyond the work itself, there were a lot of work-adjacent factors: such as eating together, playing board and card games together, and working on puzzles and crafts together. But over the past five years we’ve settled into new patterns, and there’s a lot to like: more time with family, no more traffic, easier collaboration with remote employees (no more telepresence robots attending meetings), and so on.
Humbled and Honored
Last year was truly rewarding!
Our goal of simplifying OmniFocus 4 for beginners (while making it more flexible than ever for power users) earned us a superlative nod.
When Apple announced the finalists for their Apple App Store Awards for the best apps and games of 2024, under the “Mac App of the Year” category they wrote these words: “OmniFocus 4, for fostering focus with simplified task management.”
This suggests that we achieved our original goal for the OmniFocus 4 redesign. We were humbled and honored at the same time.
Year in Review
Last year was also an unusual one! We approached Apple’s revolutionary, new spatial computing platform with tremendous excitement, and were thrilled to ship OmniPlan as a native app on the Apple Vision Pro on the day it launched, along with compatible versions of OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner. Using OmniPlan on the new platform brought back childhood memories of watching my father spread paper Gantt charts across an entire living room. With OmniPlan on the Apple Vision Pro, it’s easier than ever to work with a Gantt chart which spans the room!
Prior to sharing last year’s roadmap, we had just shipped OmniFocus 4.0 with a unified, approachable, modern, and customizable interface. And within weeks of the Apple Vision Pro shipping we shipped OmniFocus 4.1 as a native app for it. But we didn’t stop there. By the time 4.1 shipped OmniFocus 4.2 was already in TestFlight, adding some very exciting new perspective rules to filter custom perspectives based on dates (like “has date in range”), repeats, and more! We then moved on to OmniFocus 4.3, with support for device Focus Filters; OmniFocus 4.4, with lock screen controls, tinted home screen support, and Apple Watch double-tap gestures; and finally rounded out the year with OmniFocus 4.5, adding powerful new Shortcuts, Genmoji, and new Mac appearance customization controls.
We also updated OmniFocus for the Web, refreshing its appearance, adding support for new view options, adding support for renaming folders and clearing the sidebar selection, improving stability of the app’s servers, and improving compatibility with Genmoji added on other platforms.
Of course, OmniFocus isn’t our only product! We were ready with updates to all of our apps across all their supported platforms when Apple shipped their own major platform updates: macOS 15 Sequoia, iOS 18, iPadOS 18, watchOS 11, and visionOS 2.
On the automation front, we made it easier to install plug-ins with Omni Automation Install Links. And Sal Soghoian introduced a new project: Omni Automation Vids are super quick video screencasts of tips, techniques, and concepts related to Omni Automation.
On our podcast The Omni Show, we’ve continued to have many wonderful conversations with the amazing people in our community. And for those who engage better with visual content, it’s now available in both audio and video formats.
Streamlining Purchasing Options
Over the next month, we’ll jump on spring cleaning early by streamlining our purchasing options for new customers, updating our apps and online store to streamline subscriptions and focus on traditional version-based licenses. Through the year, we’ll continue to work towards making all those traditional app licenses universal, so that purchasing the app on any platform provides access to it on all platforms. We started that transition with OmniPlan 4, continued it with OmniFocus 4, and look forward to completing our transition to universal apps when we ship OmniGraffle 8 and OmniOutliner 6. As we’ve already found with OmniPlan and OmniFocus, universal licenses greatly streamline our purchasing options!
Into the Future
Speaking of OmniGraffle 8, you can expect to hear a lot more about it this year!
A lot has changed in the industry since we designed the first version of OmniGraffle for Mac OS X back in 2000. Before the iPhone, we only cared about the Mac platform. In 2025, speaking for myself, the Mac platform is still core to my productive work life—but it’s no longer the only platform I’m productive on: I also have OmniGraffle on the iPhone in my pocket so I can view and edit synced documents no matter where I am. I have OmniGraffle on my iPad, where I can use my finger or an Apple Pencil to quickly sketch out something—perhaps leaving it rough, perhaps polishing it later. And, internally, I have a native OmniGraffle on the infinite canvas of the Apple Vision Pro.
All of these platforms have their own design strengths and design constraints. We want our apps to feel familiar across all of them so you don’t have to learn the app again when you switch platforms. Our apps also need to leverage each platform’s strengths while living within their constraints. Our apps need to be approachable—while still offering the powerful capabilities that make them true bicycles for the mind that dramatically increase our effectiveness.
We’ve had all this in mind as we redesign OmniGraffle 8. The other thing we have is a few decades worth of customer feedback, which show us how people actually use the app in practice.
For example, customers have often wished for a way to easily and automatically update all copies of an object whenever the reference copy changed. We’re adding support for this with reference objects. Folks have also wanted to specify how components of a group are automatically resized or repositioned when the group is resized—which we’re implementing with the autoresizing palette. Another long-standing request is for skewed shapes—it’s been fun to see the team put this in place as well, including support for smart alignment guides that automatically adjust to match the skew of the positioned shapes.
Some of the teams using OmniGraffle have told us that their ideal collaboration flow would allow a diagram to be reachable from a URL, so they could link to the original source directly from their team’s internal documentation. We’ll talk more about how we’re solving this in the next section.
With all that in mind, plus how we use OmniGraffle ourselves (for system architecture, app design, data analysis, and so on), we’ve spent the last few years experimenting with how all the pieces of this puzzle fit together, gathering feedback from our own use and from early outside testers. (Our thanks to each tester!) We look forward to extending our test builds soon to include OmniGraffle on iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS.
We still have plenty of work ahead as we finalize our feature set and design, but I hope you will enjoy the end results of our long investment!
Document Links
Over the past decade, one of the interesting problems that we’ve been pondering is how best to link to documents in native apps. We were one of the initial signers of the Linking Manifesto: we know how important it is to easily link to things, and we’ve long supported links within all our apps. As noted above, teams would like to easily link to an OmniGraffle document. But document links can be fragile, and this isn’t just an OmniGraffle problem; it’s a general problem that applies to linking to any documents. Documents already do have a URL that the system uses—the file URL—but those URLs are often only useful within the local system. As documents have become protected by app sandboxing over the past 15 years, even those local URLs have become less useful.
What we need is a way to link to content that works across all our apps, across all our devices, and that can ideally be shared with a team.
These links shouldn’t depend on, or require, any specific syncing solution. You should be able to use it with any of your own documents, whether they’re synced through iCloud, DropBox, or Google Drive. You should also be able to use it with whatever solution your team is already using to sync documents, whether that’s Box or git or even ftp. You shouldn’t have to share your documents differently, or have to put them somewhere different; you should be able to link to them where they are. Individuals and teams have already solved the problem of syncing shared documents; what has been missing is a simple way to reference them.
So we’re building just that. In our latest OmniGraffle 8 test builds, you can now copy a link to the current document and get a URL that you can paste into any app, or share with any team member. This link can be opened on any device: if the device doesn’t already know how to find the document, OmniGraffle will prompt and ask where to find a synced copy.
In my own testing, I’ve already found this to be incredibly useful: I’ve started updating my OmniOutliner documents to include links to other outlines and diagrams, and even to documents our team members keep in their shared git repositories. Rather than refer to something as “Go look in Derek’s folder for the OmniGraffle 8 charter document,” I can simply link to that document. When I open it on a new device, I’ll be prompted once for the location of Derek’s folder; from then on, any links to content within that folder will open without a prompt.
These links already make my life simpler, making it easy to reference documents and open them with a simple click. And, as we ship this capability in all our apps, being able to share links to shared documents will also make life much easier when working within a team. Related documents will be able to refer to each other, and team members will be able to follow those references as easily as they follow links on any web page.
These links will also be useful for automation. All of our document-based automation is much more functional when it gains the ability to create links to documents and reference those links using a mechanism that works across all my devices. Using these links, an OmniFocus plug-in would be able to automatically archive content in OmniOutliner, update a shared project in OmniPlan, or update a diagram in OmniGraffle.
OmniFocus 4 Train Still Rolling!
We shipped a number of great improvements to OmniFocus over the past year, as noted above, and we plan to keep up the pace in the coming year. When developing OmniFocus 4, we designed it to be more flexible than earlier versions, with customizable outlines and inspectors that can be tailored to display and edit what you need.
But during this process we were intentionally very careful not to introduce any features that would make it more difficult to sync with earlier versions. We wanted to give customers time to upgrade to v4 with as smooth a transition as possible. We’ve been able to make some workflow improvements without changing the sync format, of course. We added a Nearby perspective in v4, and we’re looking forward to adding a Kanban view.
But we’ve been looking forward to making deeper improvements to the OmniFocus workflow which take advantage of v4’s more flexible interface—perhaps at the cost of maintaining sync compatibility with older versions. Now that OmniFocus 4 has been shipping for over a year, we’re ready to consider a broader range of improvements!
For example, we think there is opportunity to improve the way OmniFocus schedules tasks. Each task currently has two dates related to scheduling. Its due date is the date it should be completed by, while its defer date is the date it becomes available. (In OmniPlan, where tasks are scheduled in much more detail, we would call these the start after and end before constraints.) Both of these dates are important, but they leave an important question unanswered: when do you actually plan to do the task? (What is its “do” date?) Some people end up using (and moving) the due date to schedule their tasks, while others use the defer date. But neither of those fields are truly ideal for scheduling. We think adding a scheduled date would improve the way tasks are scheduled.
We also think there are opportunities to improve tags. We introduced tags in OmniFocus 3 as a replacement for contexts, making it possible to assign more than one tag to a single task. But while it makes sense to combine some tags (such as “Priority: High” and “Location: Grocery Store”), other tags are mutually exclusive (such as “Priority: High” and “Priority: Low”). It would be nice if assigning a “Priority: High” tag to a task would automatically remove any other “Priority” tags already assigned.
And remember those document links we were just talking about in the previous section? What if OmniFocus automatically generated links to living documents for files you drag into your notes, rather than embedding static copies of those files?
Meanwhile, we continue to develop OmniFocus for the Web, with our current big project being an update to use the latest React web frameworks. We expect that work to ship before WWDC.
We look forward to keeping up the momentum in OmniFocus with another year of great updates!
What About Apple Intelligence?
Apple has been rolling out new Apple Intelligence features over time, and we expect to see many more improvements over the coming year.
We continue to appreciate Apple’s respect for privacy in their approach to Apple Intelligence—so rather than collect all our data to process in the cloud (and wondering how that data is being used), our devices become smarter about working with data they already have (and only use that data in ways we ask). Any other approach is inconsistent with our privacy values.
Apple Intelligence is an ambitious project that is still under development. We have ideas for workflows that it might ultimately be able to do with our apps, but we don’t know whether that will require specialized training or whether it will be able to figure out how to do those things based on its general training. As of today, all of the questions I asked in last year’s Post-WWDC Update (about asking Siri to make a list of actionable items in today’s email, etc.) still seem like they may be possible, at some point, but we don’t know exactly how or when.
What we do know is that the support for Apple Intelligence that we build in our apps provides the system with new nouns and verbs from our apps that it can work with. And these new nouns and verbs already have immediate utility to our customers via their exposure in the Shortcuts app!
We also know that the answers to those questions are going to change over time as Apple Intelligence continues to roll out and improve—so what’s possible today (with macOS 15.3 and iOS 18.3) is different from what will be possible over the next month, next year, and next decade.
We’ll try to make sure we’re always doing our part, so our apps are ready for whatever comes next!
Adapting to Change
Though we invariably keep our own roadmap in mind, we also always bear in mind that we’ll need to adapt to our environment as it changes. WWDC is just over four months away, and will undoubtedly introduce developers to new versions of macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and visionOS. We know we’ll need to spend some of our summer working to update our apps to be compatible with these platform updates—whatever they may be—so that our apps are ready to ship alongside those updates in the fall.
Our world is constantly changing! Our roadmap is never a perfect prediction of the future, and is subject to change in response to our changing environment. But I hope this gives you some sense of our direction: where we’ve been, what we’re working on today, and where we’re headed next.
(At the Omni Group, we make powerful productivity apps which help you accomplish more every day. Feedback? I’d love to hear from you! You can find me on Mastodon at @kcase@mastodon.social, or send me email at kc@omnigroup.com.)
