You may have noticed that Apple has made our summers quite busy in recent years, keeping us on our toes by introducing first visionOS, then Apple Intelligence, then Liquid Glass. Relatively speaking, this summer’s operating system updates were a breath of fresh air! We do love new technology and we’ve enjoyed working with each new thing—but this summer we were relieved to update our apps to reflect Apple’s refinements from the last few years, rather than adapting our products for yet another new major technology launch. (Naturally, that reprieve didn’t last long! We now only have a handful of weeks to get ready for the launch of the iPhone Duo announced last week.)

First things first: we’re pleased to report all of our apps are ready for all of Apple’s platform updates, compatible universally across the board. This is no small juggling act, with OmniGraffle supporting three platforms, OmniOutliner and OmniPlan supporting four platforms, and OmniFocus supporting five platforms—especially while we’re simultaneously pushing forward on new major features of our own for each product.

We know that many of you want to be productive on the new operating systems right away, so it’s a priority for you that our apps be ready as soon as possible—and thus it’s a priority for us. We have a good track record of being available “day and date,” but that’s not automatic and there are no guarantees: our track record comes from prioritizing that work. So this year, as always, it’s a relief to be able to say today, on day one, that “we’re ready.”

Of course, each summer we also try to go beyond that foundation of basic compatibility to take advantage of whatever new developments Apple is introducing. This summer, that meant adapting our apps for this year’s refinements to Liquid Glass, while exploring how our apps can best leverage new capabilities coming with Apple’s refinements to Apple Intelligence and Siri AI.

So, what’s ready, and what’s changed?

OmniFocus 4.9 adds support for Siri AI, optional new date parsing assistance via Apple Intelligence, and a range of new and updated App Intents exposed as Shortcuts actions. Alongside full compatibility with macOS 27 Golden Gate, iOS 27, iPadOS 27, watchOS 27, and visionOS 27, this release fine-tunes design elements throughout OmniFocus and introduces a new option for customizing the behavior of the Perspectives Bar on iPhone.

OmniOutliner 6.3 includes new Liquid Glass refinements across all Apple’s platforms, making the app feel more at home on the new operating systems.

Our other apps which are now compatible with ‘OS 27 include: OmniPlan 4.11 (for all platforms), OmniGraffle 7.26 for Mac and OmniGraffle 3.23 for iPad and iPhone, and OmniPresence 1.10. (Even the latest test builds of OmniDiskSweeper and OmniWeb have been updated.)

On the automation front, we’ve added new API to OmniFocus and OmniOutliner that humans and tools can use to search the Omni Automation API. (How meta!) This means that as we work towards implementing the Model Context Protocol (MCP), that interface can be much more efficient by giving tools the ability to write scripts while only pulling in the documentation needed for the task at hand.

While building these updates, we explored how our apps can leverage new capabilities with Apple’s refinements to Apple Intelligence and Siri AI, as well as finding out what Siri and Apple Intelligence can and cannot do at this time.

Built for the Future of Siri AI and Apple Intelligence

Apple has built a really great foundation for the future of Siri. Siri started out answering questions about things it could find on the Internet (stock prices, sports scores, and so on). It grew to control your device in simple ways (start a timer, etc.) that expanded over the years. Now, leveraging Apple Intelligence, Siri AI understands a lot more of what we say, and has access to the personal context we already have on our devices—putting that information to use, while still keeping it private and under your control.

Giving Siri access to personal context is a big advance. I’ve always been able to search my computer for a locally stored document, but with Siri I can now ask questions about the content stored in those documents. I trust my computer with that content—it already lives on my device, after all—so it’s incredibly powerful to be able to ask the computer to reference and do something with it.

Let’s say we just had a meeting, and a team member sent out the minutes. I can ask Siri to create reminders in OmniFocus for the follow up items from that meeting. All of this can be done while keeping my data private and secure, on devices that are under my control. The system doesn’t need to copy my data elsewhere; it just has new ways of working with this data it already has.

It’s a tremendous leap forward for those of us who like to control our own data. And it’s still early days for this technology: we see potential for more progress in the future.

That said, there are some important limits worth noting.

In our testing we’ve found that the new Siri AI hasn’t yet learned how to work with app capabilities that it hasn’t specifically been trained on, even for App Intents that are available in Shortcuts and Spotlight. For example, its understanding of how to work with OmniFocus is based on how it’s been trained to work with the Reminders app. Our work in OmniFocus 4.9 means that Siri now knows about “reminders” in OmniFocus (i.e. actions and Inbox items), “lists” (i.e. projects) which contain reminders, and any “groups” (i.e. folders) that lists have been organized into. Siri can assign and edit reminder due dates, flags, repeat schedules, and notes and image attachments in OmniFocus. This is another great leap forward! But as soon as you try to go beyond what Reminders can do, you find its limits: for example, it doesn’t understand the distinction between due dates, planned dates, and defer dates.

Siri also doesn’t really understand much about how our document-based apps work, because Apple hasn’t trained it on our specific apps or anything equivalent. So, Siri doesn’t know how to make an outline, or a diagram, or a Gantt chart. We expect this to improve over time—after all, we’ve worked with other language models that do understand how to make those things—but it’s important to understand Siri’s current limits.

Siri now knows what’s on the screen, which gives it a lot more context than it used to have. And Siri has some ability to manipulate things on the screen—sometimes. However, Siri doesn’t actually know how to fully control the screen. It doesn’t yet understand how to activate controls, or invoke commands from menus such as our plug-in actions. Fortunately, on macOS Voice Control can fill that particular gap, and a few years ago we did a lot of work to implement Voice Control: with one install, you can control every menu command in OmniFocus using your voice. Voice Control and Siri are designed to work together cooperatively. You can ask Siri to do something; then use Voice Control to open a window, switch perspectives, or run a plug-in; then go back to talking with Siri. (To learn more, check out OmniFocus Voice Control page put together by our automation expert, Sal Soghoian.)

Taking a step back, a fundamental limit to understand is that language models are not perfect oracles. Models generate statistically probable responses to prompts, not actual answers to questions. Models don’t know fact from fiction. You can ask Siri questions about what it can and can’t do and try to explore its limitations, and it will make up plausible responses to those prompts. But those answers are often just made up, or regurgitated from its training set without true understanding. The answers may sound authoritative, but that doesn’t mean they actually reflect reality.

Overall, though, it’s exciting to see how much more capable Siri has become. And I haven’t even covered everything! Beyond Siri’s traditional capabilities, beyond personal context and improved language processing, Siri now also has Visual Intelligence to gather information from the world around you—combining Optical Character Recognition (OCR), handwriting recognition, shape recognition, and other visual AI technologies. For example, you can pick up a note with hand-written action items and ask Siri to add those items to OmniFocus. Or you can take a picture of a whiteboard and ask Siri to do things with that input.

Spotlight has been an important Mac technology for decades, and our apps have had strong support for Spotlight since it was first introduced in 2005. With Siri AI, Spotlight becomes even more important as a source for personal context. You can ask Siri about content in your OmniFocus database, so Siri can summarize the actions you’ve completed this week, or tell you what items you might consider working on soon.

There’s a lot here to celebrate! Apple’s advances are great. And, as noted above, we never take for granted that we’ll make our goal of having all our apps compatible on the day and date that the operating systems are released; so it’s a huge relief to have all of that work done. We celebrate that those updates are shipping!

Also, last week we celebrated the 34th anniversary of the Omni Group (the date we registered omnigroup.com)! Speaking of things we never take for granted, 34 years is quite a long time. Looking back at 1992, the Soviet Union had just dissolved at the end of the previous year. Meanwhile, from our neck of the woods in Seattle, Nirvana had taken over the music charts, and the novel Snow Crash had just popularized terms like “metaverse” and “avatar.” And, especially relevant to our tech world, NeXT was just shipping NeXTSTEP 3.0.

When we say this is our anniversary, “our” includes you: we couldn’t have made it this far without you. Thank you for supporting us through all these years! Of course, we’re looking forward to celebrating our 35th year next year as we continue this journey with you.

This is the original logo used by the Omni Group from 1992 until the Aqua redesign in 2001. (I created this on a NeXT using Pixar’s RenderMan with a hand-written text RIB source file, back when 3D renderings of marble carvings were still novel.)

(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.)

For over 25 years, OmniGraffle has been helping you draw beautiful diagrams, family trees, flow charts, org charts, layouts, and other directed or non-directed graphs. When you want to organize anything graphically using boxes and lines, OmniGraffle is your tool.

We’ve been hard at work on the next version of OmniGraffle, and it’s nearly ready as a universal app for Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Apple Vision Pro. OmniGraffle 8 for iPad and iPhone is now available in TestFlight, alongside test builds of OmniGraffle 8 for Mac. (OmniGraffle 8 for iPad and iPhone test builds require iPadOS or iOS 27, OmniGraffle 8 for Mac test builds require macOS 15 Sequoia.)

Want to give OmniGraffle 8 a try? Head on over to our test page, and check out the release notes, then send your feedback to omnigraffle@omnigroup.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

(And we look forward to sharing more news with the rest of you soon!)

The best design decisions come from paying closer attention to what people actually do. Today we have designer, writer, and Draft consultancy founder Nick Disabato exploring how evidence and experimentation can turn design into a genuine business advantage.

Nick shares how customer research helps uncover the gap between what people say they want and how they actually behave, why even experienced designers are routinely surprised by A/B test results, and how decades of using OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner help him move quickly from messy problems to clear, testable ideas.
Achieve more of your goals when you download Omni software for Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch—and if you have any questions or feedback, email support@omnigroup.com. Our amazing Support Humans are standing by, ready to help.

Enjoy!

A truly dependable productivity system doesn’t just organize your good days; it carries you through the days when everything goes sideways. In this episode, Dr. Peter Gallant (entrepreneur, engineering professor, pilot, and longtime GTD practitioner) shares how he uses OmniFocus to manage a remarkably full personal and professional life with clarity and confidence.

Peter walks through his approach to the technique of total capture, the OmniFocus 4 features that transformed his workflow, and why separating active commitments from reference material made his system dramatically easier to trust. It’s a thoughtful, practical conversation about building a low-friction system that can evolve with your life.

Achieve more of your goals when you download Omni software for Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch—and if you have any questions or feedback, email support@omnigroup.com. Our amazing Support Humans are standing by, ready to help.

Enjoy!

In this episode, we sit down with renowned cognitive scientist, author, and philosopher, Paul Thagard, to explore the invisible architecture behind our beliefs, emotions, and decisions. You’ll discover how Dr. Thagard developed Cognitive Affective Maps to visualize the relationships between ideas and associated values, why OmniGraffle became the indispensable tool for communicating decades of groundbreaking research, and how the diagrams reveal insights that words alone often miss.

From empathy and motivated reasoning, to artificial intelligence and the surprisingly powerful role of diagrams in shaping understanding, this is a thought-provoking conversation. It may inspire you to open OmniGraffle and map out your own ideas in an entirely new way.

Achieve more of your goals when you download Omni software for Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch—and if you have any questions or feedback, email support@omnigroup.com. Our amazing Support Humans are standing by, ready to help.

Enjoy!

Today we learn from Maggie Delano, an Associate Professor and Chair of Engineering at Swarthmore College whose work spans teaching, department leadership, medical device design, inclusive engineering, research, and everyday life. Maggie shares how OmniFocus helps them move from a scattered sense of tasks and responsibilities into a durable system built around projects, areas of responsibility, and intentional planning.

Listeners will hear how Maggie adapted ideas from Tiago Forte’s PARA method, why they use OmniFocus alongside other tools, and how they decide what belongs in a task manager versus a notes system. Along the way, they offer thoughtful advice on productivity that goes deeper than “just use this app,” by examining whether the root challenge is technical, psychological, or external.
Achieve more of your goals when you download Omni software for Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch—and if you have any questions or feedback, email support@omnigroup.com. Our amazing Support Humans are standing by, ready to help.

Enjoy!

I also really enjoyed meeting up with other visionOS developers at the Step Into Vision event during this year’s WWDC. The energy of the visionOS community reminds me of the NeXT era, with passionate developers and users working with a tiny platform because they believe it’s on the path towards the future they want to build—not because they’re trying to hitch themselves onto an existing juggernaut of commercial success.

It was also fun to join James Dempsey and the Breakpoints playing at Live Near WWDC.

And, of course, beyond meeting up with the community, for this year’s WWDC we thought that Apple might refine some of the major leaps forward from the last two years. And they did not disappoint!

Heading into WWDC is a moment to look back at what we’ve achieved so far from our January Roadmap. This year looked different in that we had just shipped OmniOutliner 6 at the start of the new year. We’ve since shipped two feature updates to OmniOutliner, introducing a powerful collection of new Shortcuts actions using App Intents in OmniOutliner 6.1, and localizing into ten more languages in OmniOutliner 6.2 including Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese and Spanish.

As planned, for the past several months we’ve predominantly focused our attention on OmniGraffle 8. However, that didn’t keep us from delivering maintenance updates to OmniFocus and OmniPlan, and continuing to test our new OmniFocus sync servers in Amsterdam and Singapore.

As discussed in the 2026 Roadmap, OmniGraffle 8 is designed to be a universal app. For current testers, we’ve expanded its test beyond macOS to include iOS and iPadOS. We’ve been working hard to craft OmniGraffle 8 as a universal app and add new diagramming features. OmniGraffle 8 is still the biggest release we have planned for this year, and we’re really looking forward to it!

With all of this work under our belt, we headed to Cupertino to see how Apple’s announcements might affect those plans.

Looking Ahead

Last year we started designing our approach to Kanban in OmniFocus. I originally started off thinking that Kanban might simply be another way of viewing existing perspective contents. But then I went back and re-read the book, “Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life,” which refreshed my sense of some of the flexibility we may want to offer.

I shared those thoughts with the team; and the more deeply we thought about the use cases for Kanban, the more we realized we needed new flexibility that our current perspectives don’t provide. I think we now have most of the initial design work done, so it should be ready for our engineers to work on soon after OmniGraffle 8 ships.

At WWDC, Apple shared how they’ve been making SwiftUI more robust. Apple has been using it themselves as the foundation for new AppKit and UIKit features, whereas previously SwiftUI was entirely built on top of AppKit and UIKit foundations. Fortunately, our investment in SwiftUI continues to pay dividends: both immediately with its cross-platform benefits, and in the long-term as Apple demonstrates their clear commitment to it. For example, they’re making SwiftUI view content much easier to drag and drop, making swipe gesture support easier to add, and so on. We can see it’s not just talk; they’re walking the walk.

Even smarter intelligence

Siri is the face of Apple Intelligence, but behind the scenes Apple Intelligence has a whole range of technologies in Golden Gate and OS 27: Siri App Intents, App Entities, On-screen Awareness, App Domains, Foundation Models, Private Cloud Compute, Core AI, Visual Intelligence, and Image Playgrounds.

Over the last two years, our team has continually to worked to adopt App Intents in our apps. So far, this has given us powerful new Shortcuts actions for OmniFocus and OmniOutliner, modernized Omni Automation support, and has improved our integration with Spotlight. This year, the investment will pay off even more as Siri begins to work with App Intents, including the ability to work with our apps using natural language, and for Siri to know what elements of our apps are on screen.

We’ve already implemented access to Apple’s Foundation Models by way of Omni Automation plug-ins, and with the new APIs introduced at WWDC26 we’ll be able to expand that support to support alternate models. We’re also prototyping new ways we might leverage Foundation Models directly in our apps to implement new natural language features.

Our particular approach to querying the on-board Apple Intelligence is well-aligned with Apple’s approach, valuing privacy and working locally. We’re glad to see Apple build a platform for AI, not just a narrow solution. You can expect our future efforts to continue to value privacy, work locally, and put the user in control.

We have been thinking deeply about how AI has been advancing. The technology itself can have some really great applications, when put to good use. But there are also real controversies and real concerns. We’re very careful about how we use AI ourselves. I look forward to talking about that in more depth, but that’s a whole different topic for another day.

AI technologies are moving fast, so we applaud Apple’s nimble approach. Apple doesn’t need to limit the system to one LLM, when they can instead make it easy for third parties to provide LLM options.

At WWDC, we also watched to learn whether Apple’s architecture would have a place for existing AI harnesses and orchestration tools, which talk to apps using the Model Context Protocol (MCP). We’ve been watching the MCP space all year, but we’ve been reluctant to implement something that might be redundant with work Apple was doing. This year, Apple did announce MCP integration for Xcode, but not for App Intents; Xcode’s integration is only for developers, not for end users.

Now that we know what Apple is (and is not) planning, we can continue thinking about how best to add first-class MCP support (perhaps by integrating directly with Omni Automation or with our App Intents).

Implementing MCP support will make it easy for customers who have started working with Claude and other LLM orchestrators to integrate their AI-based workflows with our apps. Some customers have already wired up MCP to all of our apps using our Omni Automation APIs, but we want to make this easier for all of our customers who have this need.

We want our apps to be available for our customers who are trying to work in those AI ecosystems, but we also want to be careful not to impose AI on those who have concerns or who are not interested. Wish us luck! And if you’re interested in helping us test this work, let us know.

OS 27 Compatibilty

While we are excited about the new features described above, our very first priority for this summer (as it is every summer) is to ensure compatibility of our apps by September, across all operating systems, on all platforms (Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Vision Pro, and Apple Watch).

Behind the scenes, this includes all of our universal apps (OmniPlan 4, OmniFocus 4, OmniOutliner 6, and the upcoming OmniGraffle 8), of course—plus OmniGraffle 7 for Mac and OmniGraffle 3 for iPhone and iPad. (Updating multiple different versions of OmniGraffle… have we mentioned we can’t wait for OmniGraffle 8 to also be universal?)

It’s amazing to think that the iPad’s support for multiple windows is only a year old. It already seems like it’s been there forever. Liquid Glass was an ambitious project, but has indeed unified app interfaces across Apple’s platforms. And the promise of a Siri that can actually understand natural language is finally being realized. After two years of Apple announcing dramatic changes at WWDC, we’re enjoying the calmer waters of the important refinements in this year’s updates.

Once again, we have a fun, busy summer and fall ahead!

(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 in the Mastodon corner of the Fediverse at @kcase@mastodon.social, or send me email at kc@omnigroup.com.)

Magic happens when visual thinking leads to a way to tell better stories. In this episode of The Omni Show, we talk with documentary filmmaker, George Washington University professor, and LinkedIn Learning instructor, Jason Osder, about his creative path, his history teaching OmniGraffle for UX and brainstorming, and the role visual tools play in shaping complex work.

Jason shares how OmniGraffle has supported everything from information architecture and wireframing to virtual index cards for documentary storytelling, giving him a flexible space to map ideas before they become finished projects. Listeners will hear a thoughtful conversation about filmmaking, teaching, process, and how diagramming can help clarify not only what we’re making, but how we think.

Achieve more of your goals when you download Omni software for Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch—and if you have any questions or feedback, email support@omnigroup.com. Our amazing Support Humans are standing by, ready to help.

Enjoy!

In this episode of The Omni Show, we talk with Peter Boumgarden, PhD, Koch Professor of Practice for Family Enterprise at Washington University, about how OmniFocus helps him navigate work that rarely fits into one tidy category. On any given day, Peter might prepare a talk on private equity and healthcare, meet with university leaders, grade student work, coach T-ball, and catch a flight…all while trying to keep sight of the bigger picture.

Borrowing from several wise disciplines, Peter outlines his particular approach to using OmniFocus to organize, plan and narrow his attention to next actions. He also shares his novel approach automating the reflective component, borrowing from the social psychology of journaling, to close out the day effectively. Listeners will hear a thoughtful, practical conversation about building a system which balances focus with flexibility, efficiency with exploration, and productivity with a richer understanding of vocation and life.

Achieve more of your goals when you download Omni software for Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch—and if you have any questions or feedback, email support@omnigroup.com. Our amazing Support Humans are standing by, ready to help.

Enjoy!

Cue the song “It’s a Small World” as background music for today’s terrific announcement. We’re very pleased to share with you that OmniOutliner 6.2 is available today (universal across all platforms), now with localizations in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese and Spanish. Or should we say, “now with localizations in Deutsch, Español, Français, 日本語, Nederlands, Italiano, Русский, 简体中文, Português do Brasil and 한국어”?

“Great things often begin with outlines” is true in any language. Outlines help clarify ideas, develop concepts, and stay organized amongst interruptions and chaos. This is all true anywhere in the world—but a powerful, helpful tool for outlining is a much better experience when it’s available in one’s own native language. We localize all of our apps, and it’s gratifying each time.

For us, localizing our software isn’t just a checkbox: it’s an expression of our values. We value people, respect our international neighbors, and encourage listening to each other with humility. They say to put your money where your mouth is, but what they don’t tell you is how great that really feels: to dedicate resources in a way that aligns with your values and mission.

Now that OmniOutliner 6 is a universal purchase across the Mac, iPad, iPhone and Apple Vision Pro, it’s especially fitting to have it localized across all of these languages. Our OmniOutliner 6 customers can now experience—in native tongue—the new design, visually refreshed with beautiful Liquid Glass design elements and a modernized look and feel; the new smart Dynamic Themes; the ability to open and work with concurrent multiple windows of the same document; Omni Automation with plug-ins to access Apple Intelligence language models; plus our groundbreaking Omni Links.

You can read more detail from our OmniOutliner 6 introduction blog post and the OmniOutliner product page. To get started with a free two-week trial that unlocks OmniOutliner 6 across all your devices, simply install OmniOutliner 6 on any device and sign into your Omni Account.

Here’s to keeping your thoughts in order, and the great things you’ll begin with an outline!

If you have any feedback, I’d love to hear from you! You can find me in the Mastodon corner of the Fediverse at @kcase@mastodon.social, or send me email at kc@omnigroup.com.