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Originally Posted by jamesafoster View Post
The blog says "first quarter 2013". I see that it is available in beta, by invitation only. But being available 1Q13 would seem to me to mean that the actual product would have been available 3-6 months ago.
Sorry if my blog posts were unclear on this point! It was never our intent to ship in Q1, only to publicly reveal the app for the first time and to start making it available to testers. Here's what I wrote on the blog about projecting an OmniFocus 2 ship date:


How soon will OmniFocus 2 be shipping?

The simplest answer to that question is that I don’t really know! A more accurate answer is that the answer really depends on what feedback we receive from all of you. We use an iterative development process at Omni, so our next step is to ship a private test release so we can get feedback from customers on how well it’s working in practice. Based on that feedback, we’ll update our design and ship another private test release (and invite more people into the test pool), and the cycle begins again. How many times we repeat that cycle depends on how long it takes for us to feel like we’ve achieved our goals for the release.

Once we finish those rounds of private testing, we’ll post a wide-open public test release for anyone to download from our website, and finish up some of the other hard work of writing documentation, translating the app and documentation to other languages, and submitting the app to Apple for App Store review. Usually this final stage takes 4-6 weeks—at that time, it should be much easier to accurately project a ship date.

Our plan all along has been to react to whatever we learned along the way, and take however long it takes to achieve our goals for the release. Again, I apologize if that wasn't clear to anyone!

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And will there by OP integration?
I tried to answer this question in one of my comments in that blog post:
We haven’t forgotten OmniPlan integration or project templates or user-configurable metadata—far from it!—but we already have plenty of work to finish for v2.0 and want to ship that work before we commit to more.
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Just so you know, OmniGroup friends: I used to love all the OG products, but I am become very frustrated with the glacial pace at which promises are delivered. I no longer use anything bug OF and OGraffle, and I'm looking for alternatives for those.
Quoting from my original "iPad or Bust!" blog post:
One of the things we often struggle with as a company is deciding how much to talk about our future plans and our current work towards those plans. Our natural inclination is to be open about what we're doing, but there are several problems with talking about future plans:

• Our plans can and will change, upsetting customers who were making their own plans based on our original plan.

For example, our original plans for 2012/2013 did not involve updating all of our apps to be 64-bit, adding Developer ID, AutoSave and Versions, and adopting the App Sandbox—but those changes were all important enough to change our plans over.

But adjusting our plans to our changing environment doesn't mean we just completely ignore our long-term roadmap: we also worked on OmniOutliner 4 (now available in public test), OmniFocus 2 (now with 18,870 invited private testers), automatic document syncing (shipped last quarter), OmniFocus for iPhone background syncing (shipped last week), and more.

The way most companies solve this dilemma, of course, is to simply not tell people anything more than absolutely necessary about their future plans. Our reasons for sharing our plans were also mentioned in that "iPad or Bust!" blog post:
But there are also problems with not talking about our future plans, as it leaves people wondering what direction we're going and whether they'd like to be going that direction too. So, given the exciting event of this week, I think it's appropriate for us to share some of our plans with you now…
… but perhaps we've gone too far in that direction, leaving people frustrated because we're constantly focusing their attention on a vision of an unrealized future—rather than focusing their attention on things we've recently done and already shipped?

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I don't even use OO any more. This is very sad.
Have you tried OmniOutliner for iPad now that it supports automatic document syncing? Or have you tried the public test builds of OmniOutliner 4? These are significant recent updates, and there's no need to wait for either: they're both available to the public today.

Last edited by Ken Case; 2013-07-21 at 10:36 AM..