Ready for iOS 16 (and celebrating 30 years of Omni)
Given all of the excitement from yesterday’s amazing event, we thought you might want an update on the Omni product updates’ compatibility with the operating system updates soon to be released from Apple. Plus, we’re feeling celebratory!
At the Omni Group, we like to be ready on the “day and date” that new hardware, devices, and operating systems become available. We’re early adopters ourselves, and want our customers to also be productive with the latest updates right away—so it’s important to make sure all our apps are ready to go!
We’ve tested our apps against iOS 16 throughout the summer, and we’re happy to report that the current versions of OmniFocus 3, OmniGraffle 3, OmniPlan 4 and OmniOutliner 3 run well on iOS 16—so if you’re as eager to update as we are, there’s no need to wait!
We are also working on features that take advantage of new capabilities in the upcoming iPadOS 16 and macOS Ventura operating systems, such as customizable toolbars and lock screen widgets. These updates are progressing nicely.
We do have some sad news for OmniFocus 2 users: iOS 16 is not compatible with OmniFocus 2. Originally, OmniFocus 2 shipped for iOS 7 in 2013 (almost a decade ago—time flies!), and was replaced by OmniFocus 3 in 2018 (for iOS 11 and 12). We’re happy to have designed apps which don’t expire—customers can continue to use version 2 as long as they wish! But that’s only possible so long as people continue to run a compatible underlying system, which is outside of our control. We’re reaching out to as many OmniFocus 2 users as we can find to make sure everyone knows about the incompatibility and how to get their discounted upgrade to OmniFocus 3—and to remind that all customers who purchase OmniFocus 3 now will receive a free upgrade to OmniFocus 4 when it ships.
Speaking of time flying, today marks the 30-year anniversary of the day we started doing business together as “the Omni Group.” We registered the omnigroup.com domain on September 8, 1992—thirty (30) years ago—back when having an Internet domain had nothing to do with having a website.
We were on the NeXT platform, where the web was invented—the only platform which had any web browsers or servers at that time. (Perhaps a dozen or so, according to Wikipedia.) But we weren’t thinking about the web when we registered omnigroup.com. (Though we did write the NeXT’s first graphical web browser, OmniWeb, about 18 months later.) At that time, our focus was on forming an identity, communicating with customers and distributing our software—and for that we needed email addresses and an ftp site. So, we registered the domain.
We’ve seen a lot of operating system releases over the last 30 years—coincidentally, 30 years ago today was also the day that NeXT shipped the NeXTSTEP 3.0 operating system! We love being on the cutting edge, and over the years each OS version continues to build to something better than what we’ve had before.
We hope you enjoy iOS 16 when it ships next week, and we look forward to keeping you posted as we continue to ship new feature updates. Stay tuned!
