[Last update: 7/29]
Hello, everyone! Remember back in iPad or Bust when I said that our natural inclination is to be open about what we're doing, but that there were several problems with talking about future plans?
Well, I'm running smack into one of those problems right now: we were hoping that we'd be ready to submit OmniFocus for iPad to Apple on June 30, and we shared that date last week. It's wonderful that everyone is so excited about that date, but I need to remind everyone that June 30 was never intended as a promise—it was simply our best estimate at that moment.
The team has been working around the clock on this for quite a while, and we made a very big push over the weekend. We're in that part of the development cycle where it's hard to predict exactly how soon we'll be done. The app feels very close—but tomorrow is closer.
Just in case you're still wondering "So when will OmniFocus for iPad be ready?"—I'm afraid I don't have anything else to suggest beyond what I just said: we're working around the clock, and at this stage it's hard to predict exactly how soon it will be done. We're still testing the app and we don't know what issues we'll uncover or how long those issues will take to fix. So, again: it feels close, but tomorrow is closer.
Sorry, I know this will be disappointing news for many of you—it's certainly disappointing for us. But we think the time put into the final product will be worth it: thank you for your patience. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me directly at kc@omnigroup.com.
7/12 UPDATE: Sorry, I know the wait has been hard for everyone. (It's been hard for me, too!) This weekend I invited several people to help us beta test OmniFocus, and their feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. I have to keep reminding myself that Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien, "the perfect is the enemy of the good," and that "not shipping" might be a worse flaw than a missing feature that we'd really like to implement. (After all, there's always 1.1!) To that end… I've been sorting through a few hundred bits of feedback to decide which issues and suggestions are important to address for 1.0 and which ones can wait. I'm about half-way through the list, and will post another update soon.
7/16 UPDATE: We've reached a big milestone: we've declared feature and UI freeze. The documentation is written, we have an intro video and welcome document, and so on. But we're not quite done yet: we're still tuning performance and memory usage, fixing glitchy animations, and eliminating crashes. Our test pilots are busy finding problems so you won't have to.
7/20 UPDATE: Code freeze! Release candidate tagged and built, it just needs to be put through a (hopefully final) round of testing.
7/21 UPDATE: Submitted to the App Store! (I know they're very busy, but according to Apple's latest stats they review 85% of new apps within 7 days.)
7/28 UPDATE: The clock is definitely ticking, but there are still about 12 hours for OmniFocus to remain part of the 85%. If you'd like to be notified by email the moment OmniFocus is available on the App Store, subscribe to our low-traffic OmniNews mailing list.
7/29 UPDATE: Expecting App Store approval at any moment. If we receive it between now and 6am tomorrow (Pacific Time), that's when we plan to release.
