[whpalmer4]

Originally Posted by blackacre

Thank you for the response, Brian.

It seems clear that the only reasons for complete silence rather than some basic guess (i.e., sometime in the next YEAR) after all the waiting are (1) the projects are nowhere near completion or (2) have been abandoned or at least indefinitely delayed. After all, Omni has provided exact DATE estimates for other projects (although I acknowledge that backfired when the company did not meet the deadline). We are asking for an estimate that is MUCH less definite than you have given for other products.

I wish you would go ahead and tell us the truth, but at least we can make that assumption on our own and start looking elsewhere.

If you read the blog posts, you'll see that they have given you such estimates.

From iPad or Bust: 2 down, 3 to go!

Meanwhile, I'm sure many of you are wondering about the other three apps: OmniFocus, OmniOutliner, and OmniPlan. We're currently working on OmniFocus and OmniOutliner in parallel. OmniFocus has a bit of a head start, thanks to the work we'd already done in bringing it to iPhone, so we anticipate its iPad app will be ready in June. OmniOutliner is a little further out, and our current projection is that it will ship this summer. Finally, after we've shipped those four apps, we'll round out the set with OmniPlan for iPad which we're currently anticipating will ship sometime this fall.

Okay, so there's the prediction for OmniOutliner for the iPad.

For OmniOutliner 4, from iPad or Bust!:

Similarly, the OmniOutliner team is also heavily into a major development cycle—one which affects not only the next major release of OmniOutliner, version 4, but also the upcoming major releases of both OmniFocus and OmniPlan—so that team is booked up for at least the next several months. But while it won't be on iPad on day one, OmniOutliner is where all of our projects start and we think it will be a great fit for iPad, so we plan to adapt it as soon as possible.

From iPad or Bust: two weeks later:

Now, I mentioned two weeks ago that we were generally prioritizing iPad work over some of our Mac projects, but that some Mac projects—specifically, OmniOutliner 4 and OmniPlan 2—would take precedence over their iPad counterparts. In response to that plan, I received a lot of feedback that folks would like to see OmniOutliner for iPad sooner rather than later.

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!