What’s this? Another “Ready for…” blog post? Didn’t we just do one of these last week? Well, yes!
Last week, we shared that all of our shipping apps were ready for iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and watchOS 10. But last week, macOS Sonoma (aka macOS 14) hadn’t shipped yet, and—more importantly—we weren’t quite ready for it to ship.
With macOS Sonoma, Apple made more far-reaching changes to some long-standing developer techologies than they usually do. Our testing against the release candidate indicated that most of our Mac apps were going to need updates to fix compatibility issues—issues that could cause our apps to crash or otherwise misbehave. (Some of the AppKit API that changed had been stable for the last three decades—since OPENSTEP 4.0!)
So when we wrote last week’s “Ready for…” blog post, we couldn’t include macOS Sonoma in the list of platforms yet—not just because it hadn’t yet shipped, but also because we were still hard at work updating our Mac apps to make them ready.
But today is the day macOS Sonoma actually 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.
The Mac platform continues to evolve over time, occasionally deprecating old functionality. This year, macOS Sonoma dropped support for the encapsulated PostScript (EPS) format and no longer converts it to PDF. This shouldn’t affect many existing OmniGraffle documents, since we’ve used PDF-conversion support for the past decade for better compatibility with iOS (which never had support for EPS). But if you’re still working with EPS content, you may need to adjust some of your workflow. Our EPS export continues to function and remains available.
Meanwhile, macOS Sonoma has introduced quite a few new features that directly benefit our lives on a daily basis—and at the top of that list is its improved support for widgets.
First of all, widgets can now be placed right on the desktop. A click on the desktop hides all your other windows to reveal your desktop files and widgets. This change benefits all widgets, including those in OmniFocus 3.
But even better, widgets can now be interactive, and we’ve introduced interactive widgets in the TestFlight builds of OmniFocus 4 on all platforms. For these newer widgets, this means you will be able to complete OmniFocus items directly from the widget, instantly—whether or not the app is open. Useful!
Here’s how these interactive widgets currently look on macOS Sonoma:
Because of the far-reaching changes in this upgrade, we prioritized testing and updating essential functionality over cosmetic issues. Please don’t hesitate to let us know if you notice anything we might have missed, and we’ll get to them as soon as we can! (For example, we’ve noticed that some icons are not displaying in Retina quality in OmniGraffle, which we’re working on fixing for our next update.)
If you’re as keen to upgrade to macOS Sonoma as we are, there’s no need to wait! We’ve enjoyed all the Omni apps on the Sonoma beta ourselves over the summer, and are glad to be sharing them with you today.
To update a Mac app that you downloaded from our website, choose the “Check for Updates…” command from the application menu. If you don’t see the “Check for Updates…” menu item in one of our Mac apps, that means the app was downloaded from the Mac App Store and you can update the app there.
All of our apps come with a two-week free trial; so if you have been meaning to check them out, now is a great time to take them for a spin! If you’re still using older major versions of our apps, don’t forget to take advantage of our 50% discount on upgrades.
We’ve found macOS Sonoma to be a great upgrade, and we’re sure you will too!
(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.)
