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******** Update 7/23/10 ********

I apologize for the lack of recent OmniOutliner status updates and we greatly appreciate all your patience and enthusiasm for OO. As you may have heard, we just submitted OmniFocus for the iPad to Apple on Wednesday night (yay!). So as far as our iPad plans go, that puts OmniOutliner up next which has actually been in development for a little while already. As far as an estimated release date goes, around the end of summer is our current goal.

So where does this put OmniOutliner 4? Well, as we also mentioned before when we announced our iPad plans, we don't want the iPad app to delay development on OO4. So both OO iPad and OO4 are concurrently being worked on and work has never stopped on OO4. What's taking so long then? The last few months our OO4 developers have been very hard at work getting our outline view and related animations finished. This work is unfortunately taking much longer than anticipated. Due to this, our current best estimate for release is near the end of this year. I know this isn't what you wanted to hear, but I assure you the OO4 team is hard at work and we certainly haven't abandoned or shelved the app.

And that's the current state of all things OmniOutliner. Once again, thanks for your continued support patience!


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Incase you haven't been following our blog, we announced two weeks ago that we're planning to bring five apps to the iPad: OmniFocus, OmniGraffle, OmniPlan, OmniGraphSketcher, and OmniOutliner. I'm sure this brings up the question of what happens with OmniOutliner 4 for some of you.

Well, at first we were planning to not changing any plans and starting on the iPad version after OO4 was out, but after our iPad announcement it was clear that there is a big desire for OmniOutliner on the iPad as soon as possible. So in response to that we've modify our plans a bit as detailed in this follow-up blog post.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ken Case
So we started thinking about how we could get started on OmniOutliner for iPad sooner. We really don’t want to delay OmniOutliner 4, so we instead started thinking about how we could finish OmniOutliner 4 more quickly. We realized that if we scaled back some of the esoteric features which we’d planned for the Pro edition of version 4—cloning and multiple schemas—we could shave three months off its development schedule and get started on OmniOutliner for iPad that much sooner. Now, both of those features are still pretty interesting to us, and we’ve already laid the groundwork for supporting these in the underlying outlining engine—but we think bringing OmniOutliner on iPad is more important overall, so that’s what we’re going to do.

So I’m pleased to say that both OmniOutliner 4 and OmniOutliner for iPad will be coming three months sooner!

Oh, what’s coming in OmniOutliner 4? We’ve rebuilt the engine inside of OmniOutliner, so among other things it will support text zooming, showing and hiding columns, “Smart Match” completion cells, searching across all column types, better link handling (no more unfindable tokens!), and (in the Pro edition) saved smart folders. (Also, say goodbye to the old Aqua drawer!)
So, both are still coming and OO4 will be release first, but not with all the features we had planned. The bonus is they're both coming sooner!

Last edited by DerekM; 2010-07-23 at 12:28 PM..