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Share this story. SAN FRANCISCO, CA—Three years ago, the Omni Group decided to go ',' in order to prioritize the iPad as a new platform for the company's well-loved software. Now, in 2013, CEO Ken Case has declared it's time to get back to the Mac, unveiling the company's plans to release OmniFocus 2 for the Mac on Thursday at Macworld iWorld. The highly anticipated update to OmniFocus sports a new look, borrowing design elements and features from OmniFocus for the iPad. But the software is still in progress—Case says the company plans to take feedback from users in order to refine the UI before its final release, which he hopes to happen in the first half of this year. Case is the first to admit that OmniFocus 1 for Mac, while popular, was not the most user-friendly of software packages.
'OmniFocus had a lot of power users, but it was not very approachable and awkward to navigate,' Case told Ars during the conference. 'With OmniFocus 2, you'll no longer need a degree in OmniFocus to use OmniFocus.' When Omni built the first version of OmniFocus, Case pointed out, the company didn't really know where it was going. 'We didn't really know our goals, we just wanted to help people get things done,' Case said. But when Omni paused its Mac software development in an effort to go all-in on the iPad, it learned many lessons about user interface.
'Based on customer feedback, OmniFocus on the iPad is by far the most usable of all the apps,' Case said. So what did Omni decide to do? For one, it unified all navigation within the app into a single sidebar.
It also added a forecast mode as well as review modes (again borrowed from the iPad app). Review mode allows you to set a time for when you want to engage in specific tasks again—in a week, or a month, or twice a year, etc.—so you don't get overwhelmed with the tasks at hand. 'One of the things that happens in task management tools is that you end up collecting a lot of projects and tasks, and it's easy to collect so much information that you're overloaded,' Case pointed out. When dealing with tasks in review mode, OmniFocus will also show calendar events from your iCal app if you want to see them all together.
OmniFocus 2 was only part of what Omni decided to unveil in front of hundreds of onlookers at Macworld on Thursday night. The company is also on the verge of launching OmniOutliner 4—after having rebuilt the outlining engine around Core Animation in OS X, the company feels there is a lot of potential for additional features. Siam discovery movie theatre. There's text zooming support ('by far our most popular request over the last 8 years,' said Case), a new column visibility UI, style system matching, and an updated look and feel. / A look at OmniOutliner 4. 'First, we wanted to deliver something based on the new engine so we could stop maintaining the old engine,' Case told Ars, 'but Core Animation gives us a lot of room to grow and develop in the future.' This is all in addition to OmniPresence, Omni's open source tool for allowing businesses or organizations to sync their own documents without relying on someone else's (such as Apple's) cloud network.
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The technology runs on a standard WebDAV server, making it possible for groups that rely on Omni's products to automatically sync documents between iPad and the Mac. And OmniPresence, when it ships later this quarter, will manage conflicts; adding documents, renaming documents, and so on. 'We think a lot of businesses will want to host their own data on their own corporate network instead of relying on someone else's,' Case said. Indie business is stronger than ever Case noted that although he said the company is shifting its focus back to the Mac, it's really doing iPad and Mac concurrently. 'We couldn't keep up the same pace as before the iPad with the same number of people, so last year we crossed the 50 employee mark,' he told Ars. In fact, I pointed out that the, Apple had just introduced Reminders to iOS 5, potentially threatening Omni's business with OmniFocus.
'Ever since Apple introduced Reminders, our sales have still been great,' Case said. 'In a lot of ways, things got better because when Apple added Reminders, it added Siri integration.' Omni was able to take advantage of Apple's API for Reminders and incorporate those reminders into OmniFocus, effectively adding its own Siri support. 'That has been a great feature that people love.'
Omni doesn't know exactly when it plans to release OmniFocus 2, but it does know that it plans to release a 'standard' version for more basic users at a lower price point. The standard edition won't come with custom perspectives or AppleScript support—features that are popular among pro users—but it will come with an easily digestible price of $39.99. That's half the pro version's $79.99 price, and upgrades from OmniFocus 1 will come at a 50 percent discount for both pro and standard versions. The software is going into a private beta phase now, with a public beta soon thereafter.