Quote:
Originally Posted by bassman
but I'm starting to "lose faith". I'm happy that the initial version is out (it is usable), and am quite content to have something rather than nothing, but hope that features added to round-out basic usability are considered "free minor updates" and not "major releases for a fee". OmniPlan is basically comparable to the decent $10 apps right now, so hopefully we'll get free updates until some of the basic usability is rounded-out.
I have enthusiastic high hopes for OmniPlan!
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You're new to the forum, so I don't know how long your experience with Omni's iPad apps is. Mine's about as long as possible without having been an Omni employee :-) Here's my belief: you don't have much to worry about in terms of Omni putting its hand out for more money, for a number of reasons.
A big reason off the bat is that (now watch Tim Cook announce a change here in a few minutes!) Apple doesn't provide them with a way to do major releases where the customer doesn't just buy the product again. Omni's upgrade policy has long been to give existing customers credit for 50-70% of the price of the new version. In a world where they cannot do that, but with a customer base which is accustomed to it, there's going to be a reluctance to call something a new major version and incur all of the associated headaches unless it's pretty major. But they've been making iPad apps for almost 2 1/2 years now, and the number of them that have even hinted at being ready to be called a new major version is 0. If I had to pick a likely contender for the first one, it would be OmniFocus for iPad at such time as OmniFocus 2 for Mac is ready.
Even for the Mac, where prior to the advent of the Mac App Store there was little preventing them from putting out new major versions whenever the urge struck, Omni has always given its customers a substantial development "tail" after release. OmniPlan first shipped in early January 2007. We didn't get OmniPlan 2 until September 2011. What happened in between? Scads of bugfixes, extensive improvements to the Gantt and Resource views, live filtering, scheduling granularity controls, attachments, more Applescript support, import/export enhancements, dragging multiple tasks, view customization, import of MP 2007 files, leveling performance improvements, etc. OmniPlan 2 got a facelift + the baseline for the collaboration features, so it wasn't just a revenue enhancement ploy! OmniFocus has been out even longer, and is still the original major version — even giant features like sync have been delivered at no extra charge. Because you give them more cash up front, they don't need to come back with their hands out as soon.
I made a table of all of the versions of all of the iOS apps that have been released since the announcement of the iPad on 1/27/10 in
this post. Hopefully looking at the list will give you a sufficient feel for the veracity of their expressed view that what is first released is just a starting point, not the final result. I can pretty much guarantee that there will be features someone feels are important which appear much more slowly than they would like; I've certainly got some of my own for the other iPad apps. For the most part, they do a decent job of providing what most users need and keeping all the products moving forward.